The message of David Swing to his generation; addresses and papers

E OF

THE MES
DAVID SWING

EDITED, WTH INTRODUCTIONS

JEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS

UNIVERSITY OF

ILLINOIS UORARY

R

lt
HIST. SURVEY

The Message of David Swing
to His Generation

By Newell Dwight Hillis

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HENRY WARD BEECHER
A Study of His Life and Influence

LECTURES AND ORATIONS BY HENRY WARD

BEECHER
Collected by Newell Dwight Hillis

THE MESSAGE OF DAVID SWING TO HIS GENER-
ATION

Compiled, with Introductory Memorial Address
by Newell Dwight Hillis

ALL THE YEAR ROUND
Sermons for Church and Civic Celebrations

THE BATTLE OF PRINCIPLES

A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery
Conflict

THE CONTAGION OF CHARACTER

Studies in Culture and Success

THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC
Studies, National and Patriotic, upon the America of To-
day ^and^To-morrow

GREAT BOOKS AS LIFE-TEACHERS
Studies of Character, Real and Ideal

THE INVESTMENT OF INFLUENCE
A Study of Social Sympathy and Service

A MAN'S VALUE TO SOCIETY
Studies in Self-Culture and Character

FAITH AND CHARACTER

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FORETOKENS OF IMMORTALITY
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DAVID THE POET AND KING
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HOW THE INNER LIGHT FAILED

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RIGHT LIVING AS A FINE ART

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THE MASTER OF THE SCIENCE OF RIGHT LIVING
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ACROSS THE CONTINENT OF THE YEARS

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THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME
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The Message of David Swing
to His Generation

Addresses and Papers

With an
Introductory Memorial Address by

NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS

NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO

Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH

Copyright, 1913, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 125 North W abash Ave.
Toronto : 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

Contents

MEMORIAL ADDRESS ....

9

By Newell Dwight Hillis

ADDRESSES AND PAPERS . .

3i

By David Swing

American

I.

WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN, I

33

TI.

WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN, II .

54

III.

JAMES A. GARFIELD ....

72

IV.

CHARLES SUMNER ....

88

V.

WENDELL PHILLIPS ....

107

VI.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

124

VII.

PHILLIPS BROOKS ....

'39

VIII.

DECORATION DAY ....

'59

IX.

THE DUTY OF THE PULPIT, IN THE

HOUR OF SOCIAL UNREST

176

Foreign

X.

A ROMAN HOME ....

199

xr.

DANTE ......

232

XII.

MARTIN LUTHER ....

260

XIII.

VICTOR HUGO .....

278

INDEX . . . . .

294

The Message of David Swing

A Memorial Address
By Newell Dwight Hillis

A MEMORIAL ADDRESS1

By Newell Dwight Hillis

\ SSEMBLED again within these familiar
,/JL walls, affection claims her rights and
memory tells us that now years have passed
away since he who was at once our pastor,
teacher, sage, and seer gave forth his final
word before passing on forever.

For twenty years and more the eager mul-
titudes who loved him thronged and crowded
here, where he informed of beauty, traced
the rugged truth, gave men vision and divine
uplift. And other multitudes there were,
whose feet indeed have never trod these aisles,
but who were wont to wait each week for his
printed words, and when his message closed,
they were as desert pilgrims who found the
heavenly manna had ceased to fall, the great
rock had ceased to flow in cooling streams.
Unceasingly with pen and voice did he ply
men with motives of culture and duty, seek-

1 Delivered October, 1895, in Central Church, Chi-
cago, where Professor Swing was succeeded in pastorate
by the speaker.

9

The Message of David Swing

ing by light and darkness, by hope and love
to make men patriots, Christians — the ver-
itable sons of God. Oft did he rejoice in
our good fortune ; full oft was he touched
with our griefs ; a thousand times he pointed
out for us the paths wherein lay the most of
happiness and the most of peace ; and when
at last his great friendly presence was with-
drawn from our homes and streets we found
ourselves looking with altered eyes upon an
altered world.

"When the news of his death came, it was
with us as with Phillips Brooks when he
learned of the death of his friend Kichard-
son, the architect of Trinity Church. In
that hour the great preacher turned to the
window, and in silence gazed long into the
open sky. " It is as if one should wake to
find the mountain which one's window had
always faced, and upon which one's eyes had
always looked, suddenly and forever gone."
And now though the first full year is past,
the vanished feet still walk with us, the
silenced voice still whispers in our dreams.
Knitting our brows to the daily task, we
have proved that death does exalt those who
remain to weep ; that our sorrows must en-
noble duties, not end them ; that our tombs
10

A Memorial Address

/

and our tasks are entangled ; that the rich
blossoms of the heart grow crimson, nour-
ished by our graves. And so we are here
to-day to keep a tryst with memory, to re-
mind ourselves of what our friend was ; what
were the forces and causes that made him
so ; and by every motive of honour, to pledge
ourselves anew to duty, to culture, to beauty,
to God, to His divine and human Son who
taught His servant how to " dip His sword,"
not in blood, but " in heaven."

To-day in this presence we remember that
the true measure of a city's civilization is the
kind of man it reveres and loves. Dying,
Lord Bacon said : " I leave my name and
fame to foreign lands, and to my country-
men when some time be past." It was to
the shame of Florence that a century rolled
by before her citizens were able to appreciate
the exiled Dante, whose genius redeemed
Florence out of meanness and obscurity.
Ours is a world where the fathers kill the
prophet to whose tomb the children throng
in innumerable multitudes. But it is to the
lasting praise of our city, and proves how
high our society has risen in the scale of re-
finement and character, that in his lifetime
an eager hearing was given to this sage, who
II

The Message of David Swing

spake of pure morals, whose theme was the
folly of ignorance and vice, and the suprem-
acy of truth and duty.

We know that eloquence is partly in the
orator's charm ; another part is the kindling
response of the appreciative hearer. And
that generation must have loved the higher
life and been touched to the finer issues, that
loved this man who was the most refined of
American preachers, and whose sermons and
essays have a certain grace and delicacy and
sweet completeness that make them alto-
gether unique. Always our loves tell us
what we are, and foretell what our children
are to be. Whenever Providence would
order a forward movement of society, He
raises up some giant who capitalizes the new
spirit. Howard, Garrison, Lincoln com-
pacted in themselves the diffused ideas of
philanthropy, reform, liberty, and then flamed
these ideas forth upon the common people.
Looking to these heroic leaders, soon the
multitude went up and took a place beside
them.

It seems, therefore, like a special token of
divine favour that God sent us this man to
capitalize before our people ideas of taste
and beauty ; of patriotism, liberty and re-

12

A Memorial Address

ligion. For not our harbours crowded with
ships, not our lakes fringed with forests, not
our mines, our factories and our stores stuffed
with treasure have been God's best gift to
this people : God's best gift has been the gift
of great men like Lincoln in statecraft ; like
Grant in defense of country; like Beecher
and Brooks and Swing as teachers of religion.
And to-day it is a source of ]oy and gratitude
unspeakable, that here to this new, rude,
bustling city Providence sent one who seems
like some Plato lifted out of his Athenian
groves, and set down in the midst of our
booths and markets, to build for us a temple
with pure Ionic lines : to light upon its altars
the sacred Hebrew flame.

Recognizing his masterful genius, our
editors, authors, and people have come to
rank David Swing with the great pulpiteers
of our generation. Comparing mind with
mind, we speak of Spurgeon as devotional,
Beecher as philosophical, Brooks as inspi-
rational, Swing as poetical. Seeking a sym-
bol of the qualities of each, we say that
Spurgeon was a speaking trumpet, Brooks
was a flaming heart, Beecher was a quaking
thunderbolt, Swing a singing harp. But
when many attempts have been made to
13

The Message of David Swing

search out the power of this poet-preacher,
his secret still remains a mystery. Until we
know why the rose is sweet, or the sunbeam
light, or the babe divine, we cannot know
why the seer is the best benefactor of hu-
manity.

George William Curtis tells us that while
the poet's power is less dramatic, less obvi-
ous, imposing, and immediate than the power
of the statesman, the warrior, and the in-
ventor, yet his influence is as deep, strong
and abiding. For while the soldier fights
for his native land, the poet clothes that land
with charm and fires the warrior's heart with
energy invincible; while the statesman or-
ganizes liberty, the poet feeds the sacred
fires ; while the inventor multiplies the con-
veniences of life, the poet deepens the life-
spring itself. To-day we may not fully un-
derstand the power of our poet and seer, but
we joyfully confess that he revealed to us
our deeper convictions, filled us with fervour
and aspiration, and, in an age of fret and
fume, lifted us into the realm of tranquillity,
through parable and poem teaching us where
were the paths leading unto happiness and
peace.

When Macaulay was shown the vast clus-
14

A Memorial Address

tering vine in Hampton Court, with a trunk
like unto a tree, he expressed a wish to be-
hold the mother root in Spain from which
this scion was cut. Similarly, we confess to
an eager desire to trace the ancestral forces
that united in this elect child of genius. No
great man appears suddenly. Ancestral
momentum explains unusual strength. The
foot-hills slope upward towards the mountain-
minded man. Each Emerson has back of
him seven generations of scholars who seem
the favourites of heaven. Back of Henry
"Ward Beecher was a father who was at once
a moral hero and an intellectual giant, and a
mother who shot the sturdy Beecher type
through and through with rich, warm, glow-
ing tones. Thus the students have traced
our friend Swing's parentage back to the
border-lines of Alsace and Lorraine. There
we front the old German stock, — philo-
sophical, scholarly, ponderous, yet mystical
and a dreamer of dreams. And over against
the German stands the Norman, with a cer-
tain lightness and nimbleness of mind —
graceful, imaginative, full of rollicking hu-
mour— his speech all rippling with sunshine
and his lips bubbling over with lyric song.
And Providence ordained that all the best
15

The Message of David Swing

qualities of these two types should converge
and meet in this poet-preacher. As for the
rest, all is veiled. His genius is an unread
riddle.

When the explorer has traced the river
Nile back to the initial lake he has still fallen
short of the source of that mighty stream.
Above him in the distant clouds are the
secret invisible agencies out of which issue
the summer's storms and the winter's snows
that fill the springs and crowd the water on
in massy flow. And the secret of greatness
is partly ancestral, but chiefly divine. God
breathes it. Its sources are in that holy of
holies where dwell clouds and thick dark-
ness. There God girded this man for his
task, and sent him forth with faculties like
the prophet's sword.

Searching out the essential qualities of his
sermons, an English author has said : " Other
sermons are logical or instructive or inspir-
ing, but Swing's always add that element of
beauty that turns language into literature."
Misunderstanding this aesthetic element, some
men have been captious and critical. But
with David Swing beauty was no mere
mush of aesthetics ; no mere love of decora-
tion and ornament. Beauty with him was
16

A Memorial Address

not the frosting upon the cake ; nor veneer
upon the world ; nor Horace's purple patch
upon a humble garment. Beauty was ripe-
ness, soundness, maturity. Ugliness spake
of broken laws. He saw that the pink flush
upon the cheek of the babe or maiden meant
perfect health, and that the muddiness in the
drunkard's eye was the sediment of sin. The
soft flush upon the plum or purple cluster
and the robe of loveliness cast o'er the yel-
low harvest fields was God's way of saying
that His work was done, that things had
come to ripeness and touched the limit of
their growth.

He knew that when conversation was car-
ried up unto beauty it became eloquence ;
that knowledge carried up unto beauty be-
came wisdom and refinement ; that hut-
building carried up unto beauty became
temple-rearing ; while the man who was just
and gentle stood forth before his admiring
vision with a moral beauty beyond that of
an Apollo. Therefore he revolted from sin
as from a form of ugliness and vulgarity.
As Shakespeare passed by the vixen and
scold to select an Imogen or Rosalind, as
Titian preferred the noble soldier's face be-
fore lago's, dimmed with passion and seamed
17

The Message of David Swing

with sensuality, so with winning grace Swing
placed his gentle emphasis upon whatsoever
things were lovely, whatsoever things were
pure, seeking to bring men unto that har-
mony and symmetry that betray the beauty
of God upon them.

Here in this vast centre of greed and gain,
where Mammon threatens to master men,
where youth is charmed with the glitter of
coin as birds with the glitter of snakes' eyes,
where stores and the treasure in them, fac-
tories and the wealth by them eclipse the
hidden things of the soul, here he stood for
twenty years urging that the beautiful is the
useful, that life is more than meat, that
earth is not a stable, its food not fodder, nor
its children beasts, but that man is what he
is at his best estate when he dwells in the
realm of knowledge and hope and love.
Only the next generation can tell how much
he did to strengthen those sentiments that
manifest themselves in libraries, museums,
art-galleries, institutions of higher education.
But it is for this generation to be grateful
that God saw our city's need, and raised him
up to be with others what Bacon calls an
" architect of states."

"We who love him know that another
18

A Memorial Address

striking characteristic was the seer-like qual-
ity of his thinking. Many of his sermons
were visions into which were gathered all our
hopes and aspirations, all our ideals, with
their sweet torment and discontent, with
their certain triumph and victory. In these
higher moods he saw things unseen, dreamed
dreams, fought battles, and sometimes per-
ceived afar off that glad day when the col-
umns of society should encamp upon the
heights and hang out signals of victory.
Nothing proves the creative mind like this
imaginative element. Beholding a tree, the
strict pragmatist sees nothing but fire- wood.
His unit of measurement is a tape-line, and
he estimates its moral value in terms of heat
and flame. He fears exceedingly when the
seer declares that a tree's chief use is to tell
of the goings of God among the branches ;
that a tree sings hymns and is a hostelry of
delight ; that a tree is a living creature, — its
song perfume, its words fruit. But the tree
presents these aspects, and the seer must tell
what he sees.

The imagination is a prophet. It is God's

forerunner. It plants hard problems as

seeds, rears these germs into trees, and from

them gathers the ripe fruit. It wins victo-

19

The Message of David Swing

ries before battles are fought. It works in
many realms. Without it civilization would
be impossible. Working in things useful it
enables Watt to organize his engine ; work-
ing amid the beautiful, it fashions pictures
and rears cathedrals ; working with ideas, it
creates intellectual systems ; working in
morals, it constructs ethical systems ; work-
ing towards immortality, it bids cooling
streams, fruitful trees, sweet sounds, all noble
friends' lips, report themselves beyond the
grave. For faith itself is but the imagina-
tion allied with confidence that God is able
to realize all our highest ideals.

Without this seer-like element life would
be utterly unendurable, and society would
perish under sheer weight of drudgery.
Each youthful Clay endures the privations
of the corn field, each Garfield the pain and
poverty of the canal path, because imagina-
tion unveils the future and reveals a day
when the youth shall build thrones, lead
armies, organize laws. And each reformer
endures as did the prisoner in the Castle of
Chillon. When the little seed sprang up in
his cell he saw the tiny plant swell into the
stature of a tree ; tropical birds sang in its
branches ; flowers grew over its roots ; chil-
20

A Memorial Address

dren were grateful for its shade; storms
moved towards it from the distant snow-
capped mountains. Imagination enlarged
that little plant until it became a forest, and
widened the prisoner's cell into a universe.
Without imagination no man can become a
preacher, and this divine gift was David
Swing's. By it he stripped off the hull of
dogma and found the sweet kernel. With it
he explained riddles. It helped him exalt
life's commonplaces. Under its touch moral
principles that were dead and uninviting be-
came as dry roots, smitten in summer into
fruit and beauty. This preeminent faculty
in him turned his sermons into moral poems,
pictures, gardens, landscapes. Therefore,
also Dr. Barrows' words : " If that which is
keyed to universal truth is not to be out-
grown, why should not men and women
read for generations the thoughts of David
Swing ? "

And you who heard him here know that
he was a sublime optimist. He believed in
the triumph of goodness. Pessimism seemed
to him a vulgar form of atheism. He saw
God abroad everywhere leavening society as
yeast. Growth was the spirit of the ages
and the genius of the universe. Looking
21

The Message of David Swing

backward he saw all creation set forth upon
an upward march. The stars revolved. The
dead crust of the earth rose up into conscious
life. The vegetable kingdom stood erect and
drew near to the animal realm. " The very
beasts felt something stirring in them, and
journeyed upward. Man, too, as if he heard
the music drowsily and afar off, joined the
strange procession and moved upward also."
Afar off he perceived the extinction of ig-
norance and sin, and the triumph of good-
ness. That he was not impatient of the slow-
ness of social progress argues his greatness.
Mr. Gladstone once said that the contentment
of the people was largely their blindness to a
better way ; that to-day's institutions are
concessions made to ignorance and fear.
When, therefore, we consider that the veil
was lifted before this man's vision so that
he saw a thousand wrongs that might be
righted, a thousand abuses that might be
wiped away, a thousand reforms that should
to-day be achieved, we marvel at his patience,
his buoyancy, his hopefulness, his optimism.
But he stayed himself on God, with whom
" a thousand years are but as one day."

"When he saw the church journeying for-
ward in an ox-cart, he foretold the day when
22

A Memorial Address

man's heart and conscience should move for-
ward with the speed and comfort with
which his body travels. When he saw man
dispirited with his own littleness, he whis-
pered that eloquence and art came through
great thoughts and themes ; that Christian-
ity's vision made Dante ; that paradise made
Milton ; that a madonna made Kaphael.
And so he fed the hope that the greatness
of Jesus Christ would repeat itself in each
loving heart, even as the sun sets and re-
peats its colours in the topaz and ruby.
When he saw men discouraged whose secret
cry was " No man careth for my soul," who
seemed like King Lear driven on in the
night, with head white and uncovered before
the storm, he pointed these discouraged ones
to the golden clouds and the mountain peaks,
and urged that above and beyond them was
One whose footprints are on the hills, whose
song is in the summer, whose bosom is love,
whose face and presence will explain all our
hard problems.

And when at last he saw men standing
about the open grave of falling statesman,
dying woman, sleeping child, he whispered
that for Lincoln and Tennyson to continue
beyond the grave is less wonderful than that
23

The Message of David Swing

they should enter the cradle ; that the hero
and the martyr and the beauteous mother
are not journeying forward under the em-
brace of divine laws towards a black hole in
the ground, but towards a door that opens
into heaven ; that a second life and a read-
justment beyond is the only explanation of
the death angel moving through our streets ;
that the Divine Form standing in the shadow
behind man, the divine laws girding man
about, the divine river that sweeps man's
spirit on, the divine affection for dear ones
that strengthens as the body weakens, all
these unite to feed the hope that beyond the
grave there stand Divine Arms outstretched,
waiting to receive man's soul.

The world spake of William Pitt as " the
Great Commoner," because he dealt in the
universal truths of liberty, even as science
deals with universal propositions about land
and sea and sky. Thus, in the realm of
morals, David Swing laid all his emphasis
upon the common-sense principles that are
related to men, not as Protestants or Catho-
lics, but to men as the children of God. He
caused Christianity to stand forth as a simple
single shaft. He saw that when a cathedral
was mingled with booths and shops and
24

A Memorial Address

ruined cottages, the grandeur of the temple
was injured by surroundings that have in
them no greatness. He saw that a mountain
surrounded by foot-hills for hundreds of
miles was obscured by its very complexity.
Recalling St. Peter's, he remembered that
the architects were enemies, and that the
artists quarrelled bitterly. But the temple
grew in grandeur because the columns and
arches cast off the quarrels of human life.
Eising into the sky it absorbed the genius
and love of each architect, but left his strife
and his chips to perish below.

He also knew that the human mind work-
ing in the realm of theology had been simi-
larly untrustworthy, oft maligning God, full
oft bringing Christianity into contempt.
Therefore he sought a simple religion. He
confined himself to a common-sense statement
of universal principles. He saw that God
made iron, but not tools ; pigments, but not
paintings ; forests, but not furniture ; reason
and conscience, but not creeds and politics.
But he saw also that thought determined
deeds, and that right living comes out of
sound thinking. And so instead of begin-
ning at the realm where we know least, and
working towards the known, he began with
25

The Message of David Swing

the realm where we know most, and worked
towards the unknown. Therefore, spake he
of man and his divine possibilities, his social
duties, his civil obligations, the development
of his reason, the training of his taste and
imagination, the enrichment of affection, the
culture of heart and conscience. Oft he
gave the rambling vine a new support and
pruned away the dead and leafless stalk.
Many, misunderstanding this, shed bitter
tears and filled the air with noise and strife.
But he kept at his work, for he loved that
vine as much as they, and pruned it that the
multitudes might find beneath it their shade
and shelter. He remembered that all the
great ones of history stood forth in an
" alluring atmosphere of genius, truth, and
beauty." He knew that man could never
worship a defective God. Therefore he
sought to cause God, as interpreted by Jesus
Christ, to rise before men in such a holy and
alluring form that each heart would ask the
world to join in its anthem. During his life
he sometimes destroyed. But it was only
destroying the flower that the fruit might
swell, the bursting of the bark that the tree
might grow. All his destroying was for the
sake of saving.

26

A Memorial Address

Our city's debt to him cannot be measured.
Searching out the beginnings of our institu-
tions, Bancroft says, " We can never disasso-
ciate our national greatness and our religious
teachers." Guizot said Luther made Ger-
many. Choate believed that Calvin shaped
the Swiss Eepublic. Macaulay found the
springs of English literature in the King
James version of the Bible. "When Spurgeon
died Mr. Gladstone was quoted as saying:
" This dissenter did more for England than
any statesman of his generation." The ex-
planation is, all wealth and material great-
ness begin in the mental and moral life of
the people. Things are first thoughts. The
doing that makes commerce begins with the
thinking that makes scholars. Tools, rail-
ways, cities, books, institutions are but the
inner life, crystallizing into material form.
Wake up man's taste, and he paints pictures ;
wake up his reason, and he writes books;
wake up his justice, and he works reforms ;
wake up his conscience, and he cleanses his
city from abuses. The beginnings of na-
tional greatness are not in things without,
but in citizens made fertile and rich in re-
source.

Happy this city, that produced this man.
27

The Message of David Swing

and enjoyed his presence through this, the
most plastic and strenuous period of its his-
tory ! And happy seer ; to whom God has
given so great opportunity ! Ah, David
Swing, David Swing ! The memory of thy
sweet reasonableness is upon us. Still is thy
friendly presence here, like a gentle atmos-
phere. Oft didst thou charm the fever from
our brain, the fear and anxiety from our
heart. Full oft thou didst release us from
thrall and doubt, seeking ever to make us
citizens of God's universe. Thy tireless in-
dustry doth rebuke us, until, with the Athe-
nian, we murmur : " The trophies of Miltiades
will not let us sleep." Thy courage and thy
hopefulness do still inspire us, for as the
Scottish warriors in Spain flung the heart of
the Bruce far into the hosts of the Saracens,
and by bravery reclaimed it, so thou didst
fling thy heart forward to " the feet of the
Eternal," and in death found it again. Here
and now we recall thy early struggles ; the
harsh winds that did assail thy bark; thy
nights of study ; the eager youth crowding
about you in that far-off college ; the multi-
tudes that for years flowed in hither with
goings like the sound of many waters ; the
ideals thou didst have for this great city, for
28

A Memorial Address

its libraries, its galleries, its museums, its
homes, its people. To-day a sense of debt is
upon us. For the great love we bear thee,
we pledge ourselves anew to truth, toleration,
and charity, to liberty and fidelity, to con-
viction, to the poor, to the slave and the
savage, to Jesus Christ thy Saviour, to God
thy Father. May learning like thine abide
ever in our libraries. May goodness like
thine ever lend glory to all our chapels.
May thy all-perceiving reason, thy all-judg-
ing reason, hallow our council chambers.
May eloquence lend glory to our forum and
pulpit. May heaven drop thy charmed gifts
upon our children and our children's children,
until all are Christians and patriots. And
we will give thee gratitude, and greet thee
beyond.

29

The Message of David Swing

Addresses and Papers
American

WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN, I

IN this month of February come the birth-
days of our Nation's two greatest men.
The twelfth and twenty-second days of this
month will forever take this time of wintry
deadness and hand it over to all the tropical
luxuriance of a grateful and loving memory,
and make it lie in the confines of perpetual
spring. Flowers that winter denies these
days, the Nation will supply from its heart.
Great sky-watchers those two ! Such as
Christ outlined. They illustrate the text l
and the whole character of the Man of
Nazareth. As Jesus said : Do not suffer
your thoughts and feelings to pause in the
evening and morning colours of the horizon
made by your little hills and fields and skies,
but upon those spectacles of nature permit
your souls to step upward until you shall
mark what kind of a day ought to come or

1 Matthew xvi. 3 : Ye can discern the face of the sky,
but can ye not discern the signs of the times ?

33

The Message of David Swing

is coming to the land which the Hebrews
consecrated in their prayers and holy psalms,
and which the Roman legions have brought
to such desolation — so these two modern
minds obey the Master, and rise up as illu-
mined pictures of the old lesson. And the
one standing in the valley of the Potomac,
the other standing in the sea-like prairies far
away, rested not in the scenes of nature as
painted on forest and hill, grass and sky, but
passing from these to the mightier scenery
of man, his state, his church, his home, his
library, they gave their minds and powers to
a mighty work, and as though reading all
the redness and wonder and beauty of the
sky, they said in perfect unison : To-day it
will be stormy ; to-morrow it will be fair !

According to all the biographers of Jesus,
He was a great admirer of the means granted
to man for forming some acquaintance with
his world. He thought the eye and ear
worth cultivating and using. If any man
had eyes for a special purpose he ought to
bring them into daily use. If any man had
ears he ought to be continually listening, for
the very fact of the eye and ear was a proof
ample that there would always be around
man something to be seen and heard.
34

Washington and Lincoln, I

The Darwinians hold the theory that the
first forms of animal life did not possess such
senses as the eye and the ear ; that the ex-
ternal world contained so much light and so
many things to be seen and contained so
many things to be heard that these outside
objects in their effort to get into the human
brain wore away at last the coverings of the
hidden intellect, and made such openings as
those which admit scenes and sounds. Inas-
much as matter preceded the mind, it was
necessary for the evolutionists to find some
method by which light could make an eye
and sound make an ear. Thus a demand for
an eye created the supply of nerves and
lenses and eyelids.

The religious mind assumes two notions :
that a God made a wonderful world, and
then that He gave man those senses which
may enable him to sustain many relations to
the great surrounding wonder. Happy man,
that his eye can all lifelong sweep over such
a horizon of land, water and sky, and that
his ear can note myriads of tones from the
deep sound of thunder to the song of a bird
and the words of an orator or a friend ! So
amazing are these two powers that persons
have wondered whether, if they must part
35

The Message of David Swing

with one of them, they would rather be deaf
or blind. In such an hour of indecision each
sense seems of infinite worth. From these
two forms of mental power came the old
wonderment that there should be any person
who having eyes should refuse to see their
world, and having ears should refuse to hear
it. What is true of the eye is true of the
whole mind and true of the heart. It must
be thought singular that a creature should
possess a mind without using it. Its use
ought to be as natural as the drinking of
water when man is thirsty, or the eating of
food when he is hungry.

It ought alone to follow that the rational
being having eyes will try to see the most
impressive spectacle, and having ears will
attempt to hear the most interesting or
thrilling sounds. Why gaze at a clod when
by raising the eye you can see a rainbow or
an ocean ? Why listen to a rattling, empty
wagon when by passing into a capitol one
might hear a Clay or a Webster ? Standing
amid the endless prodigality of scenes and
sounds man must be an eclectic. He must
separate the great from the small, the melody
from the discord.

Christ illustrated His own proposition. He

36

Washington and Lincoln, I

came into Judaea and at once saw it and
heard it. He came into the great Eoman
Empire — that aggregate of a hundred millions
of souls, that vast bulk of Eastern and West-
ern literature, politics, and religion — and in
a few years He saw all and heard all. He
saw the arrogance of things ; the degrada-
tion of the people, the tears of women and
children, the errors about God ; He heard all
the uproar of the race, the din made out of
the laughter of the wicked, and the groans
of the oppressed. He seemed to say : Why
should I stand here and not see the mighty
vision and not hear the mingled discord and
music ?

The month of February always recalls
two men who having eyes saw and having
ears heard. They selected the greatest scenes
and the sweetest music. They were to make
a short visit and be gone. They wisely
looked around them and listened for what
was greatest in their day. They selected
enough goodness and greatness to make
their birthdays sacred to a great nation.

When these two men .were children they

began to see and hear the truths and needs

of their nation. It is not explanation enough

to say that great ideas were already " in the

37

The Message of David Swing

air." We know that all great minds which
had ever lived had spoken some word in be-
half of equal rights and personal liberty.
From Plato to Dante the eulogy of freedom
had been perennial. That stream of truth
had indeed been reduced by many a desert,
but it had never gone dry. It was seen by
Shakespeare and John Milton. It had be-
come large in the times of Pitt and Burke.
But few were the minds which could see
clearly this noble truth of our race. The
lightning had played upon the clouds for
thousands of years before a Franklin came
to look up with eye wide open. Antigone
had seen her blind father sink down under a
crash of thunder; Virgil had seen the sky
all ablaze with this rapid fire. Thus for ages
had the thunder-storms flashed and roared
over the nations. At last came one with a
series of questions to be asked of the clouds
and their dazzling light. It is not enough
that freedom was in the air. We must love
the men who caught the fugitive and gave
it to a continent.

When we think about such men as these
two February names, we must dismiss the
words " fate " and " destiny " and give them
the credit of that choice which made them

38

Washington and Lincoln, I

so great. They deliberately chose to see and
hear their country. It is a sad universe if
hell or heaven is assigned to man by blind
fate. If the Emperor Nero was on a moral
level with St. John and St. Paul, then is our
world a failure. Man is then without praise
or blame. But if the mind can select a noble
form of being and conduct, then the world
becomes the arena of patriots and saints and
is the vestibule of a possible paradise.

In such a universe of a God and a divine
choice society must run to the Washingtons
and Lincolns, and throw at their feet the
wreaths befitting their lives. This splen-
dour is all their own. We cannot repair
to the banks of the Potomac or to the wilds
of Kentucky to take anything away. We
must go thither only to thank the two mor-
tals for seeing and hearing the passing cen-
turies. These two men were at liberty to
live worthless or injurious lives. Washing-
ton was at liberty to become a Benedict
Arnold; Mr. Lincoln was at liberty to be-
come a slave-driver or a common idler. We
must honour the two men for becoming the
friends of their race.

These two men, taken together, compose a
most complete lesson of life. The latter
39

The Message of David Swing

lesson came to supplement the defects of the
former. Washington was the child of good
fortune, Lincoln the child of adversity ; and
yet they came to one greatness, as if to teach
our generation that no wealth or poverty
need separate the heart from, great principles.
Washington had everything, Lincoln noth-
ing. From these facts it is to be inferred
that the good mind may move in its own
name. If it cannot ride in a chariot it can
go on foot.

As wealth was measured a hundred years
ago the young Washington was rich in
money. He was surrounded by scholars.
All those first families of Virginia loved a
kind of moral and literary greatness. This
high style was perhaps imported by Sir
Walter Raleigh himself who was a highly
educated adventurer, anxious to be in perfect
accord with the age of Queen Elizabeth.
After Ealeigh, a large number of families
brought to Virginia what might be called
the intellectual style. In our day the old
mental scene seems full of stiffness and
pomposity, but by the time young Wash-
ington came upon the stage the old vanity
had reached nearer to the level of natural-
ness ; yet could the picture be compared with
40

Washington and Lincoln, I

the portrait of our day it would seem a group
of wooden men and women moved by ma-
chinery. All talked in a calm, rhetorical
style. All table talk was carried on in the
language of oratory. Love letters were
composed in the measured sentences of the
philosophers. The oldest brother of Wash-
ington was sent to Oxford to be educated be-
cause there was in the Colonies no school
that was worthy of the presence and tuition
fees of such a noble Virginian. After the
return of this Lawrence, George, a mere lad,
lived in the presence of an Oxford graduate,
and must have absorbed a large quantity of
the wisdom and culture of the best town of
old England. Thus surrounded by mental
and moral influence, George became quite a
student of conduct, and when he was enter-
ing upon the world of fashion and society at
large he wrote out a set of rules which should
regulate him in his trip through the multitude
of men and women. His father, his mother,
his brother, his uncles, his neighbours were
all of one type and that type marked by
morality, politeness and a certain colossal
pride.

Contrast with such a boyhood the early
years of Abraham Lincoln. It would pain

The Message of David Swing

our hearts should we attempt to recall all
the particulars of that life in Kentucky,
Indiana and Illinois. As if one would not
suffice, that youth tasted the rudeness of
three wild States. When the poverty of
Kentucky became intolerable the family
made a long, exhaustive journey to the pov-
erty of Indiana ; and when the soul wearied
of that bitterness the family loaded all things
into an ox-wagon and moved through long
and deep mud to find the extremest hardship
of early Illinois. The moving Lincoln family
recalls the verses of Isaac Watts about the
sick man who in pain often turned over in
his sick bed, but at each turn took his dis-
ease over with him.

Kecall the young Washington with his
bright knee-buckles ; with his great Oxford
brother by his side ; the air around them full
of splendour, of culture and ambition : recall
the young Lincoln following with bare feet
a migrating ox-cart, which was simply rolling
along from the deep mud of Indiana to the
same kind of mud further West.

The picture of Lincoln would be more

tolerable if the poverty had attended the

youth only in his minority, but it refused to

leave the kind-hearted man and assailed him

42

Washington and Lincoln, I

without mercy for almost a half centuiy.
His day was darkened not only by poverty
but by other clouds.

Of that stay of fifty-seven years upon
earth only the last ten were touched with
any of the earth's kindness and beauty. It
is no wonder Mr. Lincoln carried a sad face,
for it is known that the face is shaped by
the heart. As thorns and thistles do not
produce great bunches of grapes, so long
years of cloud cannot throw much sunshine
on the cheek and forehead. The cruel murder
of April 14, 1865, completed the long chain
of grief. The clouds opened once and let
fall a little sunshine upon the man's soul,
but after those few beams came a swift dark-
ness. In sorrow the last hour was in har-
mony with the first. The tune of his spirit
ended on the sad note with which it began.
Of all great names in the modern roll-call
that of Abraham Lincoln is fullest of pathos.
Great but sorrowful, smiling through tears,
he was murdered in his only day of a per-
sonal blessedness.

Our Nation ought to be glad that it con-
tains these two forms of biography. Passing
down the times together they sweep the
whole field of American life and assure all
43

The Message of David Swing

our youth that neither riches nor poverty
must interfere with the race of the soul
towards success. If our land possessed only
the memory of the man from Illinois it
might feel that no great man can ever come
except by the way of bare feet and a maul-
ing of rails. With the daily spread and ad-
vance of riches, hope of future great men
might decline and fade. Our youth would
seem too happy in poverty ever to become
great in mind. What a poor world this
would be if only those who are barefooted
and bareheaded might run along the paths
of knowledge and fame ! And what a poor
world it would be if those who are bare-
footed were forbidden to walk or run in
those flowery roads ! But what a good
world it is, if it looks at only the faces of
those who run and never cares whether the
feet are unclad or are bright with slippers of
pure gold !

The crowns of the mental empire are not
in waiting for either riches or poverty. Plato
was rich, Socrates poor, but philosophy could
not see these distinctions ; she ran joyfully
to both. Parrhasius dressed in purple and
gold, Epictetus in the raiment of a slave ;
but art and wisdom none the less ran to
44

Washington and Lincoln, I

both these gifted people of the far past. To
our age came Washington and Lincoln to
teach our youth that greatness and useful-
ness care nothing for wealth or poverty.
They study only the face, the heart. If the
eye sees, nature fills it with great scenes ; if
the ear hears, nature fills it with melody.

Aurelius was a Roman Emperor, ^Esop a
beggar, but the sky did not care ; it con-
ferred upon both the same immortality. The
one essential thing is that the heart in youth
shall cry out, " I see the world ; I hear it ! "
These two American children met this de-
mand, and from standpoints more than fifty
years apart they read deeply the lesson
spread before them by their country. The
one looked and saw a foreign throne seeking
to rule and subjugate the New World and
prevent the spread of freedom ; the other
looked and saw slavery working its way
westward, and threatening to make negro
bondage the watchword of the Nation .
These young eyes opened wide, never again
to be closed until by the hand of death.
Although the death-beds were separated by
two generations, each patriot died amid the
shouts of a new, triumphant liberty. The
Nation on its memorial days looks back and
45

The Message of David Swing

sees two young men rising up out of their
tumultuous times. It forgets the abundant
stores of the one, the wretched poverty of
the other, and sees only the two faces, radi-
ant with one intelligence and one love.
Times and customs have undergone great
changes since these two great Americans
died. Wealth has come and political tumult
has passed away. The peace and unity
which the heroes made brought wealth to
the people and took away that old struggle
over liberty which had once made such a
company of great men. Industry, inventions,
great discoveries, land abundant and rich,
combined to exalt all the little pleasures which
money can purchase, and to conceal many a
great form of mental service and destiny.

The value of peace depends upon what
conies after it. When peace is followed by
the pursuit of money and pleasure then the
biographer must find his great subjects in the
days of war ; but when war is followed by
public education and public wisdom, then
the historian calls those years a golden age,
and war is left far behind as the thunder-
storm at night is left behind by the spark-
ling morning which follows it in high June !
Our day is depending wholly upon that young

Washington and Lincoln, I

generation which is now following the dead
aiid which has the opportunity in full to
transform iron into gold. What avail the
ox-teams which can break up the wild prairie
unless men are to follow and sow good wheat
and women are to follow and plant flowers ?
After the grave of the Washingtons new
principles must be found. New eyes must
see new happiness. The eye must again see
its world. Its vision must not be clouded by
either poverty or riches. If the young mind
cannot see great visions the world will at
last say to it : Alas that youth was born
blind !

It is often lamented by the churchmen
that Washington and Lincoln possessed little
religion except that found in the word
"God." All that can here be affirmed is
that what the religion of those two men
lacked in theological details it made up in
greatness. Their minds were born with a
love of great principles. Washington loved
and exalted each great principle. He was
compelled by his nature to select from Chris-
tianity its central ideas. This tendency was
intensified by the local friendship for France.
France was battling against a vast bundle of
false, Christian particulars. The Colonies so
47

The Message of David Swing

hated England and so admired France that
most of our early statesmen reduced Chris-
tianity to that French rationalism which was
quite well satisfied with the doctrine of a
Creator. A superstitious Christianity was
falling to pieces, and the new orthodoxy
had not yet come. Many of these states-
men, when they took any steps at all in the
path of religion, walked with God alone.

Mr. Lincoln also came seeking principles.
His mind could see greatness at a glance.
In the wilds of Kentucky and Indiana he
had seen at revivals young men and young
women preparing to shout. He had seen the
deacons and elders removing the coat and
extra clothing from the young man, and the
mothers arranging some young girls that
these converts might for an hour or two
move the upper and lower worlds with their
motions and shoutings. The present ration-
alized, orthodox church had not come. It
was not in sight. The Presbyterians saw
many of their converts fall in a trance ; the
Methodists shouted, and depended upon what
they called "the power." There were no
kind words for those rational minds which
asked for a simple religion of worship and
righteousness. The Church mistook reason

Washington and Lincoln, I

for infidelity and hostility. Mighty changes
have come since those two graves were
made.

There are few instances in which a mind
great enough to reach great principles in
politics has been satisfied with a fanatical
religion. The Cavour who emancipated
Italy became broad in religion when he be-
came great in politics. The Castelar who fed
out great truths to Spain reached the same
greatness of faith. It must not be asked for
Washington and Lincoln that having reached
greatness in political principles they should
have loved littleness in piety. It is probable
that living in our day these two men would
have found peace in that new Christianity
which is passing along in so much of truth
and beauty. Neither of these eminent men
possessed enough of poetry to have made
him worship like a Newman or a St. John ;
but in our day their estimate of God would
have passed as being an adequate faith for a
statesman. Lincoln possessed something of
the poetic sentiment, but what of this deli-
cacy lay in either soul was trampled to death
under the horses and chariots of war. When
Mars reaches out his bloody hand the Muses
sit down and weep. The daughters of Zion
49

The Message of David Swing

hang up their harps, and refuse to sing in a
bloody land.

February 12th will recall the most illus-
trious name in history, but it will awaken
thought in vain unless it shall induce the
youth to march through the past into the
present and through the present up to the
future. Memory is most useful when it
empties its riches into the urns of hope. The
past must be the musician for the morrow.
Washington saw great principles and out of
them he created the happiness of millions.
The war did not create him, for he was
selecting principles before war came. Be-
fore the seven years of battle he had been
extracting power from forty years of com-
mon life. The clouds of war did not make
his soul's rainbow, they only revealed it.
Our eyes are so poor and weak that we
cannot see the seven colours of the mind un-
less there is a black cloud behind them.
Washington made his character out of the
world's common sunshine ; he used it in the
storm.

* Around the feet of this new generation
lies to-day a world of mental and moral prin-
ciples. The Church is coming upon them,
the State is finding them like gold-dust
50

Washington and Lincoln, I

hidden in the earth. As men in the classic
lands are flinging aside dust and ashes, and
are exhuming temples, statues, and jewels,
so men of mind are passing below the dust
of the centuries and are lifting up into the
air and light truths of a divine beauty. So
vast are these hidden stores of thought that
we must conclude both politics and Chris-
tianity to be only in the early morning of
their career.

But we have come to a new crisis. It is
not to be inquired now what will the deepest
poverty do? What salvation will the rail-
splitter bring? What genius will be born
to us out of Kentucky dust ? We know the
kindness of earth in this one direction. A
more pensive inquiry is found in the wonder-
ment what salvation and blessings the rich
children are about to bring. Are their es-
tates destined like those of young Washing-
ton to turn into moral and intellectual splen-
dour ?

In high agriculture the fields must not al-
ways grow one kind of grass or grain. The
soul dies under such a tax upon one kind of
its virtues. Thus society must renew its life
and inspiration and when the fathers have
amassed gold, the children should not slay

The Message of David Swing

the rich land which produced the harvest
but they should change the growing and
make the next summer time blend with the
fruits and grains of every art, every virtue,
every hope.

Under such magical changes the plains of
humanity cannot become a desert ; like the
valley of the Nile, they will become richer
at each overflow of the advancing human
race.

The earth's possibilities are so great that
it will tax the genius of both poverty and
wealth to disclose them. Eminent women
are lamenting that woman's world will seem
so small in any world-wide display of works
and talents. But how could it be infinite ?
She was a powerless slave until yesterday.
Over the gateway of her temple she ought
to write the words: "The Works of One
Day of Liberty." But man has a long, long
history, over most of which he ought to sit
down and weep. He has for the most part
chosen to see what was least glorious. It is
to be hoped that he is penitential at least ;
and that millions of youths are in mind
and soul following those faces which, human
in America and other lands and divine in
Judaea, are looking up, and with the eye see-
52

Washington and Lincoln, I

ing all the great spectacles of God and man,
and with the ear hearing all the hymns of
religion and all the great melodies and
symphonies of human life.

53

II

WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN, II

WHILE our Nation grows older and
adds to its moral worth as rapidly
as to its passing years, its memorial days
will become more significant, and no states-
man or editor or clergyman will pass uncon-
sciously such graves as those of Washington
and Lincoln. The Greeks and Latins cele-
brated the death-days of their great men
because greatness did not reach its climax
at the cradle, but nearer the tomb. Our
country, in regarding the birthdays of its
distinguished sons, has in heart the same
feelings which the classics cherished, and
uses the joy and beauty of the cradle only
as an emblem of the subsequent splendour
of life. Any day taken from that career
which ended in 1799 — such as the day in
October when Cornwallis surrendered to
Washington — would answer as well as the
day in February for a trumpet-call to awaken
an unequalled memory. Be the hour that
54

Washington and Lincoln, II

of cradle or inauguration or farewell address
or grave, it recalls the one great historic
fact — the man.

The American habit of taking up the
birthday as an emblem of the whole page
or volume in history is well, for there the
first smile of life is seen and the cradle is
less sad than the sepulchre. This smallest
month in the year is ornamented by the two
greatest birthdays recorded upon our con-
tinent— those of Washington and Lincoln.
February 12th will by degrees become the
associate in love and memory of Febru-
ary 22d, and both will advance in honour
with the advance of public patriotism and
culture.

Only ten years lay between the death of
"Washington and the birth of Abraham Lin-
coln. In that little interregnum the people
ruled just as they do now when both kings
have long been absent from the land they
loved. But we should all see to it that the
absence is only that of the material form,
not that of the soul. The bookmaker, the
journalist, the politician, the preacher, the
poet, and the painter should carry onward
the spirit of these men and make them to be
the same moral forces in the morrow they
55

The Message of David Swing

were in the yesterday. What the old saints
are to Christianity these two patriots are
to our country. Take from beneath oar
churches the Christ and the Saints Paul
and John, and although each truth of a
natural religion would remain, what a cold-
ness would be felt in the walls ! How hearts
would freeze at the altars ! So our Nation
does not repose upon only abstract ideas, but
also upon the warm hearts which once beat
along the Potomac and in the prairies of
Illinois.

Society is moved, but also held by its
attachments, and doubly fortunate and suc-
cessful is it when its attachments bind it
to the best truths. Men love their country,
right or wrong ; but fortunate is our Nation
in that its great heroic characters were in
perfect harmony with the most refined light,
and thus truth and sentiment are in full
partnership. There have been states which
have had to apologize for the defects of
their heroes — their Caesars or Napoleons or
Georges— their emperors or queens or czars ;
but fortunate was this February in those
two cradles over which attachment and phi-
losophy join in unusual concord. Love sees
nothing that need be forgiven. Patriotism

56

Washington and Lincoln, II

and reason meet over these birthdays and,
willing to love country, right and wrong,
men may love it all the more in this unsullied
memory of right.

Next to the saints of religion must be
ranked in all our minds these saints of our
country; because our Nation asks not for
political theory only, but for a worship, a
friendship that can conquer and hope like the
faith of the Christians. When an enemy
rises up against this Republic it must always
find not a mere soulless corporation, but a
passion, a sentiment which will pluck up trees
by the root and toss mountains into the sea.
A mother defends her child not only because
of right and principle, but also because of
her affection. Thus great, pure leaders, like
those of historic memory, enlarge political
philosophy into devotion. It helped our
Nation in its dark days of 1776 and 1861
that its two leaders were so worthy of ad-
miration. The soldiers of Valley Forge saw
in their general a lofty character for whom
they could endure privations, in whom they
could trust. When they were cold and
hungry and homesick they were still in-
spired by the merit of their commander.
He had separated himself from his wealth
57

The Message of David Swing

and its peace to be a soldier against the
greatest power upon earth ; the troops saw of
that moral worth and were cheered by the
vision when all other scenes were darkened.
When Baron Steuben, an ardent volunteer
from the German army, saw the troops at
Yalley Forge, their wants of all the com-
forts of life, he wondered what held the
soldiers so firmly to their post of duty. It
was a moral power that held them — the
hope of a free nation and faith in their
chieftain. In Philadelphia the British army,
from the highest to the humblest, was spend-
ing in carousal the winter months which the
colonial troops were spending in all forms
of discomfort. One British officer kept a
gambling house in which the common sol-
diers were robbed of their gold. Thus was
the British army a military machine, while
an American army was a band of men, with
a soul in it — an army of 6,000 friends of
freedom and. of "Washington. "Washington's
dining-room of logs, a banqueting hall that
could be duplicated for fifty dollars, where
there was simple food and no carousal, be-
came an emblem of the kind of leader the
rank and file was trusting and following.
This scene was repeated in the war of seces-
58

Washington and Lincoln, II

sion. Whatever the hardships of the soldiers
in that long and awful war, the troops could
always think of Abraham Lincoln as being
in full sympathy with them as knowing what
labour and privation were, and as being will-
ing to die, if need be, for the welfare of the
country. The fame of other men arose and
fell, but Mr. Lincoln's shone with a steady
beam, however dark the night. All the
simplicity and honesty of his character, the
hardships of his early life, added to the im-
pressiveness of his name. His history made
him the basis of songs and of a deep admira-
tion.

It is wonderful that two such men, so simi-
lar, so grand in intellect and morals, came to
our Nation in its hour of greatest need. The
need did not create them ; it simply found
them. George Washington was just as hon-
est and noble when he was twenty, and
twenty years before the Independence, as he
was in the Revolution. When discontent
about rank and pay sprang up in the Indian
war, Major Washington, then twenty -two,
said he would as soon serve as a private as
serve as an officer, and for small pay as for
large pay ; that he would remain with his
regiment on the Ohio under any possible ar-
59

The Message of David Swing

rangement. Thus the subsequent Eevolution
did not make Washington ; it found him.

Thus came Abraham Lincoln into our
country, not created by the war of the re-
bellion, but created previously in the mys-
terious laboratory of nature. He was simple
in life, clear in his views of right and duty,
firm in his will, long before the flag of war
was unfurled. Circumstances ought to have
made a hero and patriot out of James Bu-
chanan, but they were unequal to the large
task ; they ought to have fashioned a leader
out of Stephen A. Douglas, but they could
not teach him the whole of the right as to
Territories where no slave had ever been.
Circumstances did not fit Wendell Phillips
nor Mr. Garrison for the highest office, for
neither of them could have carried that heart
of justice towards the South which the times
required. Many men came near being
worthy, but some valuable element seemed
wanting until this singular character was led
up out of the high grass of Illinois. He was
a marvellous combination of intellectual
power and of the sentiment of right. An
English reporter who had come to this coun-
try expressly to ridicule Mr. Lincoln for an
English paper (the London Punch), after the
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Washington and Lincoln, II

President's martyrdom confessed his poor es-
timate of the Western woodsman :

" My shallow judgment I had learned to rue,
Noting how to occasion's height he rose ;
How this quaint wit made home-truth seem more true,
How, iron-like, his temper grew by blows ;

" How humble, yet how hopeful, he could be ;
How, in good fortune and in all, the same ;
Not bitter in success, nor boastful he,
Thirsty for gold, nor feverish for fame.

" He went about his work — such work as few

Ever had laid on head and heart and hand —
As one who knows, where there's a task to do,
Man's honest will must heaven's good grace com-
mand;

*' The words of mercy were upon his lips,

Forgiveness in his heart and on his pen,
When this vile murderer brought swift eclipse
To thoughts of peace on earth, good will to men.

" The Old World and the New, from sea to sea

Utter one voice of sympathy and shame.
Sore heart, so stopped when it at last beat high !
Sad life, cut short just as its triumph came ! "

Great memory of our country, that in ten
years after the death of Washington, this
child was opening its eyes upon a continent
that was to make him a part of its second
great drama !

61

The Message of David Swing

So far is our day from the time of Wash-
ington, that many details have fallen out of
the picture, and there remains the form with-
out the life. To the new generation that
man, once called the " Saviour of His Coun-
try " and the " Father of His Country," has
become as dead and cold as a marble statue
of some ancient Greek or Eoman. The calm
forehead and noble face remain, but that hu-
man nature — which still comes to us when
the name of Lincoln is pronounced — has fallen
away from Washington. But this is not
time's fault, it is the fault of the new genera-
tion : for God has made the mind such that
it can recall past years and fill itself with
living pictures. Nature offers no reward to
mental indolence. It hates an idler in any
field. If the passion for property has injured
all love of literature and if so far as literary
taste remains it prefers a foolish novel to the
greatest pages of history, certainly in such
an age a few years will blot out scenes the
most wonderful and events the most thrill-
ing. The law of nature is that to the indus-
trious mind pursuing the best paths, the past
shall be made almost as vivid as the present.
Not eighteen hundred years ago can destroy
the picture of the living Jesus ; a hundred
62

Washington and Lincoln, II

years cannot turn into dead rock the Fathers
of the Nation.

Man is the only animal to which nature
has granted the power of seeing the past.
The brute lives by the day; but each edu-
cated soul carries hundreds of years in the
heart. Thus life is endeared, and the youth
of twenty may seem to be living in a day
thirty centuries in length. But all this land-
scape depends for its breadth and beauty
upon the mind's activity. When one comes
to the Mississippi one may see only a muddy
stream, or he can behold that stream with
De Soto at its mouth and red men on its
banks three hundred years ago ; and when
the same heart comes to the Potomac it may
see only the fishing-boys and the negroes
idle in the sun, or it may see Washington
there in those days whose sun went down a
hundred years before the sun of this sacred
morning came. Man's present is only an
hour or two, but when his mind is awakened
the past and future are melted into the pres-
ent and make each passing hour great in all
its associations and hopes.

Not all minds may indeed possess the same
power of recalling the past, but the common
mental attributes are quite uniformly distrib-
63

The Message of David Swing

uted, and few are the young persons of to-
day who could not, if so they wished, recall
the bygone times until they could hear the
leaves rustle, in the autumn, under the foot
of George Washington, could hear the axe of
young Lincoln sounding afar in the lonely
woods, could even see Jesus of Nazareth in
His cottage in the Galilean hills or in the
streets of Jerusalem. God made the soul too
great to lie poised upon the present moment.
It should rest upon the past and the future.
But if the mind possesses no activity, or if
its activity is exhausted upon transient and
worthless literature, the past falls out of life
and all the grand ones from the Divine Christ
to the human Washington and Lincoln are
only names without any meaning. Often are
they made the subjects of ridicule or wit by
hearts that have never measured the great-
ness of the lives for which the names stand.
The philosophy of that revival of interest in
the birthdays of our two greatest men is the
hope that the new generation may grasp the
past of the Nation and may pass from igno-
rance to knowledge and from silly ridicule to
deep admiration.

One of the best lessons to be read from these
two names is the warmth of their hearts.
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Washington and Lincoln, II

There was no indifference in these two char-
acters. Great as their minds were, they were
also powerful in their aif ections. Washington
suffers now from the peculiar dignity of the
old literary style. That style, perfected by
Addison and Johnson, made a letter from
friend to friend as pompous as a President's
message or a King's address to a Parliament.
Hamilton, George "Washington, and Martha,
each man and woman, used the style of
Edmund Burke ; and a love-letter read like
an oration. But translating Washington's
letters into the simple English of to-day, he
is seen at once to have been a man of deep
love, with his country one of the chief objects
of his passion. The kindness and pathos of
Mr. Lincoln are better seen because they
are expressed in the dialect of our time,
while the same qualities in Washington are
toned down by the stateliness of the Mil-
tonian English. When Washington had
bidden good-bye to Lafayette he followed
the noble French patriot with a letter
which shows the tenderness of the Amer-
ican's heart :

" In the moment of our separation, upon
the road as we travelled and every hour since,
I have felt all the love, respect and attach-
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The Message of David Swing

ment for you with which length of years,
close connection, and your merits have in-
spired me. I often asked myself as our car-
riages separated whether that was the last
sight I should ever have of you. My fears
answered yes. I called to mind the days of
my youth, that they had long fled to return
no more ; that I was now descending the hill
I had been fifty-two years in climbing, and
that although I was blessed with a good
constitution I was of a short-lived family and
might soon expect to be entombed in the
mansion of my fathers. These thoughts
darkened the shades and gave a gloom to the
picture and consequently to my prospect of
seeing you again." Strip this letter of its
stateliness and it recalls a tearful carriage
ride from Mt. Yernon to Annapolis. Wash-
ington and Lafayette journeying towards the
harbour whence the great friend of freedom
was to sail for France, riding along mile after
mile, in the Indian summer of Maryland,
make a picture which is easily filled with all
the friendship and nobleness and pathos of the
once real life. It does not ask for much
imagination to bring that good-bye ride so
near and real as to make the rattle of the
carriages audible and the slow procession
66

Washington and Lincoln, II

visible on a long hillside, and thus visible are
the travellers.

It is of fresh memory that Mr. Lincoln
was a man of unusual warmth of heart — a
twofold reminder in these two names that
our age asks for men not of vast wealth and
of endless political acuteness but men who
can love the country and be once more as a
father full of affection for all the household.
Men without affection for their nation make
citizens like Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, or
the advocates of Anarchy or political frauds.
The country needs only those children who
are capable of studying the great pages of
history and of forming tender attachments for
all that is good in our national career. It is
the evil of our day that the human heart has
passed out of power, and that machine
natures have attempted to fill up the tremen-
dous vacancy. The Treasury at Washington
is full but the Nation's heart is empty. The
rights of the negro are not secured to him ;
the tremendous frauds of corporations are
permitted to go on with a growing robbery
of the people, and all because the love of the
whole country is inactive and men of great
brain have displaced the men of large soul.
This disease of the political heart is so in-
67

The Message of David Swing

fectious that we all are touched with its
blight, and look upon our country as only a
soulless corporation.

But our government is not a corporation.
It is a vast family of dependent ones where
hearts and hands should be joined for mutual
welfare. Washington and Lincoln being ab-
sent, the Congress and the President stand in
loco parentis, and should carry onward all
that old sympathy with the people which
made all the old glory of our fathers. A
colonial officer once wrote to Washington,
suggesting that, in case independence was
secured, they establish an American king ;
that the people could never rule. Washing-
ton quickly wrote to the young aristocrat
never to speak or even think of such a re-
sult again — that the coming government
must be that of the people. Thus was he
the people's friend, and now that these
States are occupied by fifty millions of
people, the need of a friend has not under-
gone any decline. These millions are not
rich nor powerful, they need a government
which can secure to them " life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness."

That our country is not a cold corporation
may be read from the peculiar concomitants
68

Washington and Lincoln, II

in its progress. Our national l^rnns betray
a national soul. Had the old East India
Company any hymns ? Has any corpora-
tion in our land any great dead, any heroic
graves, where students and benefactors stand
to ponder and admire ? Have these corpora-
tions any eloquence like that of Patrick
Henry, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and
of Lincoln at Gettysburg ? Have they any
self-denial like that of the soldiers who fell
at Yorktown or in the Wilderness ? Have
they any poetry like "The Star-Spangled
Banner " ? Have they any torn and powder-
stained battle-flags? Hear these words, a
part of a vast hymn :

11 Oft o'er the seaman's or the soldier's bier
Droops the dear banner for his glittering pall,
Where every star might seem an angel's tear,
And every stripe Christ's mercy covering all,

" See from the rampart how the freshening breeze
Flings out that flag of splendour, where the Night
Mingles with flaming Day its blazonries,
And spreads its wavy azure, star-bedight."

Did ever the noblest corporation — the

London Bank— did the meanest in the world

ever fly such a holy banner, and compose

such words of eulogy ? Ah, no ! Our

69

The Message of David Swing

country is not a corporation ; it is a senti-
ment also, like that which binds the inmates
of a home all into one love through life and
death.

Washington and Lincoln should stand as
proofs forever that our Nation is a great
beating heart, capable of many sorrows and
a many-coloured happiness ; a great heart
like that of Jesus, which must embrace mil-
lions in its measureless affections, and love
all equally. All the struggles and disap-
pointments and labours of Washington, all
the similar pains and tears of Lincoln tell
us that when we come to the words " our
country " we have come to a living soul,
that ought to be as omnipotent as the hand
of God, as loving and pure as the heart of
Jesus, the Son of God and of all humanity.

Washington came up from Virginia,
Lincoln down from Illinois ; both came in
one spotless honour, in one self-denial, in
one patience and labour, in one love of man :
both came in the name of one simple Chris-
tianity ; both breathing daily prayers to
God, — thus came, as though to picture a
time when Yirginia and Illinois, all the
South and all the North, would be alike,
— one in works, in love, in religion, and in
70

Washington and Lincoln, II

all the details of national fame. If any of
you young hearts have begun to forget your
Nation and its heroes, you would better sit
down by her rivers and remember your lost
Zion, and weep as the old vision unveils
itself, and then pray God to let your right
hand forget its cunning rather than permit
your soul to empty itself of your country.

Ill

JAMES A. GAKFIELD'

IN that part of our earth which was made
memorable by the presence of Jesus many
of the cities and towns were located upon
the summit of a hill or mountain. The op-
pressive temperature of the summer months,
and military considerations, and also a sense
of the beautiful led those who were about to
found a village or a city to seek not always
some river-bank or lake-shore, but some hill
or crag or mountain. Nazareth, the town of
Christ's early life, was on a height, and on
one side there was a fearful precipice down
which the offended citizens threatened to
throw Him who had rebuked their sins.
The two mountains, Moriah and Sion, re-
mind us that Jerusalem was seated upon
lofty heights and was a grand spectacle to
the traveller who was journeying thither in
its palmy days. The Temple of Solomon,

1 President Garfield was shot by a disappointed office-
seeker July 1 ; died September 19, 1881.
72

James A. Garfield

the palaces of the king and his court, with
the walls and watch-towers, made up an im-
pressive scene to all coming along the valleys
of Kedron and Hinnom, and fully justified
the thought of Christ that " a city set on a
hill cannot be hid."

The domain of Christ was spiritual ; when
He spoke of material things He had the
spiritual qualities of our world in His mind.
He wished that His disciples might possess
virtues so great and so active that all society
might behold and enjoy their righteousness
and benevolence. The ages had been full of
diminutive persons who lived only for self
and for all small results — persons like to
lighted candles placed under a bushel. It
was time other forms of soul should appear,
time for the world to have minds and hearts
that should be as large and visible as cities
upon mountains. Soon after the great Pales-
tine Teacher had uttered His wish, and had
given the nations a specimen of a soul too
large and too lofty to be concealed, the
dream began to find fulfillment in many of
the departments of human life. Thought
and sentiment began to be enlarged, history
began to record greater actions and to re-
ceive into its storehouse greater biographies.
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The Message of David Swing

There came along in the living tide men
whose heads rose above the multitude like
the tall cliff which "midway leaves the
storm."

Our Nation mourns to-day the loss of one
too lofty to be concealed. All the grades of
society, looking up from the door of cottage
or palace, see this outline of a scholar, a states-
man, and soldier and president, and all mourn
that the image is no longer to be seen in
life, but only in death's pallor. The specta-
cle is made unusual not only by the merit of
the man who has died, but also by the savage
cruelty of the wound that robbed this citizen
of his existence. The eighty days of physical
and mental suffering, of alternate hope and
fear, days which reduced a powerful man to
the powers of only an infant, add their awful
part towards placing his name fully before
the civilized portion of the world. Made
conspicuous by his character and works, Mr.
Garfield becomes conspicuous by his misfor-
tune. Thus this figure stands as upon a hill,
and it will require centuries full of men and
of events to hide its colossal outline from the
gaze of mankind. Man is drawn towards
the pathetic. What touches his heart
touches also his memory. Pity often makes
74

James A. Garfield

up a large element in love. Had Mr. Gar-
field died of disease or by the limitation of
nature he would have been a large subject of
study, but millions will read his biography
in coming years because it ends in the awful
cloud of tragedy. "What do we witness to-
day, and what will those behold who shall
in future times run over the black and white
page in history, black with misfortune, white
in virtue ? It must come to us as a peculiar
fact that two of the greatest of American
names are now made more sacred by the
sadness of their deaths. As though the over-
ruling Providence desired that the young
men of this era and of future times should
study deeply the lives of Garfield and
Lincoln, their deaths were made tragic to
allure the student towards their chapters in
the annals of society.

Looking at this man not easy to be hidden,
we see the ability of our country to produce
a high order of manhood. That liberty
which in name has been the ideal condition
of all ages here verifies all the old hopes and
produces a symmetrical character strong on
every side. When a lad, although poor, this
Garfield enjoyed the free play of all his in-
tellectual and emotional faculties. He was
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The Message of David Swing

free to move towards books and profession
and wisdom. All the gates to success would
open to him as willingly as they had opened
to a Webster or a Clay. He was not im-
prisoned by birth nor by caste. The path to
law or to statesmanship was as free to him as
the path along the canal, and out of this free-
dom of a continent came an ambition of
great power. Often when distinguished vis-
itors appear in London they are given the
freedom of the city in a gold box — an ele-
gant letter before which the doors of galler-
ies and libraries and parliaments and cathe-
drals fly open. To this youth, poor and un-
known, the nation gave the freedom of the
whole circle of human acquisition, from the
study of Greek to a place in the army, from
the hall of the lawmaker to the chair of a
president ; and his ambition and energy were
inspired by the generous offer. Freedom
does not confer merit, but it affords an op-
portunity, and even allures the heart along
by its possible rewards. It creates a land-
scape which charms the eye of each one set-
ting out upon the journey of life. Despot-
ism offers a desert to all the humble of birth ;
if poor and of low parentage the mind sees
only an arid plain without tree or blossom :
76

James A. Garfield

but the liberty and equality of this land
make it optional with the traveller whether
the plain he is to pass over shall be a desert
or a magnificent garden. All is left to per-
sonal taste and industry and will. And this
taste and industry and personal power are
developed by the many and great rewards
offered to their growth. Mr. Garfield is one
more witness in this great spiritual trial,
and his testimony is direct that the liberty
of America is the greatest opportunity ever
offered to man as man. Elsewhere rewards
are offered to the few, here all are invited to
the best feast of earth.

In this eminent man the youth of to-day
may learn that early poverty and hardships
instead of breaking the heart need only sober
the judgment and compel that common sense
to come early and richly which to the chil-
dren of luxury comes scantily and comes late,
if ever it finds a dawn. We can now look
back and perceive that the hardships in the
youth of him who died as a president was
only a condition of things which made all
the philosophy which came to the young
man assume a practical form. It was not
thought a philosophy unless it held in its so-
lution much of human happiness, for when a
77

The Message of David Swing

toiler along a canal meditates it will be for
the welfare of man, just as when a slave
thinks, he thinks of liberty, just as when a
fever-patient dreams his dream is about cold
water. It has been stated recently that the
dreams and laws of reform and all welfare
do not come down from the rich and great
but up from the poor. Therefore those
statesmen who have tasted some of the bitter
things of the world know best how badly
the waters need sweetening.

This patient toiler wrought out an economy
for the millions of youth here and every-
where. He showed what will and industry
and exalted purposes can accomplish in this
wide land — that all the young need ask
as an endowment is mental and physical
health. That is the essential capital upon
which to base a large business in things
either mental or spiritual. Out of energy
and taste comes the real dignity of man.
This dead president carries us back to the
theory of old Plato, that motion or energy
lies at the origin of the universe, that the
starry skies and the variegated earth are only
expressions of the self-moved mind. To this
notion this one heart brings us back, for out
of its self -moved depths there issued a moral
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James A. Garfield

world of great attractiveness. Education,
learning, religion, politics, duty, honour and
high office emerged from the mind which
began its career far down in weakness.
That force made all the humble days and
years to be the rich veins of the later silver
and gold. As in the theology of nature we
gather up the infinite phenomena of land
and sea and sky and say the One mind made
all these wonderful and beautiful things, so
in reading this biography whose last page
has just been written in tears, the reader
will say, Behold what goodness and great-
ness have moved out of that one heart in
royal pageantry!

Was James A. Garfield great ? Ask those
early years, when adverse winds always as-
sailed his bark ; ask the nights of study ; ask
the schools where he taught ; ask the place
where he worshipped; ask the halls where
he helped enact wise laws ; ask the battle-
fields where he led soldiers ; ask the mag-
nificent Capitol where he was crowned as
republicans crown their chieftains ; ask the
cottage where he died. If out of the answers
to these questions there comes not the wit-
ness of greatness the human heart must
henceforth toil and long in vain ; earth has
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The Message of David Swing

no greatness. And yet all this human excel-
lence grew up out of our national resources
as though to show the world the peculiar
richness of the soil. And grew inland so far
that we cannot say that England or Europe
combined with America to cause this char-
acter. The boy and man lived in the heart
of the continent all surrounded by his
country; and he lies in his coffin to-day
a dead child of his nation. The country
mourns to-day not only because a man has
died, and died unjustly, and painfully, but
also because that man was her son. She
had reared him, she saw her own likeness
in his face, she loved him ; in him were a
mother's hopes. This land herein shows not
only the power of its institutions to fashion
a noble character, but that power of appre-
ciation and grief that can weep for one thus
overtaken by death.

In the scene of these few days we must
mark some signs of a higher civilization and
a more sensitive brotherhood. Looking at
the assassin we might despair of the present
and the future. We might wonder what is
the value of schoolhouse and church and
literature and freedom and the eloquence
over human rights if out of these beautiful
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James A. Garfield

things there can stalk a man much more
cruel than a brute. But while the heart
wonders and sinks over the name of that
one savage it is cheered by seeing a whole
civilized race moved by a divine pity. One
vile human creature wished to remove Gar-
field from life, but millions upon millions
wished him to live, live happily and live
long. Men of wealth and men of poverty,
men of learning and men of scanty educa-
tion, men of all the political parties, men in
the South and men in the North, and the
crowned kings and queens loved the life of
this one man and would by their esteem
have carried him beyond the common three-
score years of pilgrimage. His death was
desired by the lowest one of the human
race ; it is lamented by the entire population
of two continents. If we count or measure
these tears, if we see the Queen of England
ordering her court to put on the emblems
of mourning, we cannot but conclude that
the hate of the one assassin is sublimely out-
weighed by the esteem of the world. In
presence of such an uprising of brotherly
esteem the murderer finds his proper depth
of infamy. In the light of a universal love
we see the dark cruelty of the crime.
Si

The Message of David Swing

But we must not forget that we have as-
sembled to-day in the name of the weekly
service of God. If in this life of a president
any quality of Christianity is placed upon a
mountain top that quality cannot remain
hidden. In our times when there is threat-
ened an eclipse of faith all religious minds
must be happy to recognize the public man
who in his best manhood saw the power of
a belief in God. He realized the perfect
grandeur of the words " The Lord reigns."
He uttered them in an hour of great national
darkness, and the populace needed no other
eloquence ; and when in July last the one who
had offered consolation in calamity needed
some refuge for himself he said he was ready
to die or to live. ISTot the details of any church
faith came, but the great ideas of the Christian
religion grouped themselves around his bed —
the best angels of those sad nights, for they
were to help him when the skill of man
should fail.

It would be unjust to the name of Christ
to say that Mr. Garfield's religion was only
that of nature, only such general thoughts
as were cherished by Greek and Roman
pagans. His faith came to him through the
church of the age as it communicates its
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James A. Garfield

ideas through pulpit and press and the Tes-
tament, as it is wont to surround and teach
the young all through the days of formation,
of passion and temptation. That church en*
compassed this youth with its hymns and
morals and trust and hope, and if at last the
world saw evidences of that honour so con-
spicuous in the Sermon on the Mount and
that belief in heaven so visible in Jesus
Christ it is under some obligation to confess
that Christianity helped form that character
which to-day all admire and lament. Beyond
doubt daily association with learned men of
all the different religious sects, and the daily
discovery that many creeds made only one
kind of religious manhood, turned Mr. Gar-
field away from the distinctive doctrines of
a denomination and led him into the concord
of faith rather than into its discord ; but in
estimating the greatness of his character we
must declare that his moral symmetry was
Christlike, and Christlike his repose in the
hope of a second life. From his official and
personal height he reminds the whole land
that there should be church doors open to
all the youth, inviting them away from the
sins of the street and from the freezing touch
of a godless air ; there should be a Sunday

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The Message of David Swing

secured to the young and old, that there
might be some hours of sunlight for those
delicate plants — faith and spirituality. If
our Nation, destined in a generation more to
surpass all upon the globe in power, material
and mental, desires to be governed by able
and good men it must see to it that the
schoolhouse, and the church with its day of
rest, are kept open, for through these the
young pass on their way to all great beauty
of character and usefulness of life.

It has been the reproach of our country
that it is not rich in history ; that the mind
must look beyond the ocean or travel beyond
the ocean to reach the presence of all that is
deemed impressive. We have no venerable
architecture, no historic church, no places of
fame, no throne-rooms or prisons or towers
or crowns or jewels made affecting by the
annals of a thousand years. This objection
to our new world is well made ; but this
poverty of our country is being rapidly ex-
changed for riches — the riches seen in such
men as Lincoln and Garfield and similar
moral products of the Republic. A nation
will not long remain without history when
the lives of such men are rapidly entering
into the great open page. The old world in

James A. Garfield

its thousand-year period, reaching from the
Twelfth Century to the Nineteenth, cannot
point us to better names — names which stand
for a better union of intelligence and ability
and integrity and charity and heroism. Old
history can point us to violent deaths of rulers,
and can say here Charles I was beheaded; here
Mary of the Scots died; here Marat was slain ;
but our two great presidents have been slain
not by a multitude which was wronged but
by private fanatics, in their attack as unau-
thorized as beasts of prey. "While old his-
tory abounds in instances where men died for
some sins or wrongs, our new history points
us to two great leaders who were the un-
happy victims each of a single wicked heart ;
and died to gratify no party but amid the
tears of all parties and factions of the land.

Kapidly is our country making up a history
which will surpass those books we all read
in our early years. It cannot be affirmed of
many of those illustrious ones whose names
besprinkle the records of human life that they
surpassed this Garfield in the power to meas-
ure the wants of society and in the sympathy
that cannot forget the welfare of the people.
Where ancient great men trampled about in
the living fields, this man walked softly, f ear-
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The Message of David Swing

ing lest some flower might be crushed. That
attachment to the aged mother, that meas-
ureless attachment to the wife, were onlj
evidences that this President was the type
and product of a new age which was putting
aside ferocity and was reaching a sensibility
as to human rights which was not present in
the men who ruled once those nations which
now boast of possessing history. The Ameri-
can pages may not be many, but compara-
tively they are white.

Must we not to-day read anew the lesson of
mortality ? Must not we who have come into
this church from the many paths of the world,
along which paths we too are allured by some
one of the many forms of ambition and hope,
feel deeply the undeniable fact that we are all
hastening to the end ? The closing scene may
not be tragic, but it is coming. "We are
asked to think of these things by the memory
of both Lincoln and Garfield, for they were
both half -melancholy men, the former loving
pathetic poetry, the latter even writing it.
Lincoln in the height of his fame would say :

" The hand of the king that the sceptre hath borne,
The brow of the priest that the mitre hath worn,
The eye of the sage and the heart of the brave,
Are hidden and lost in the depths of the grave.
86

James A. Garfield

" The peasant whose lot was to sow and to reap,
The herdsman who climbed with his goats up the steep,
The beggar who wandered in search of his bread,
Have faded away like the grass that we tread. ' '

And Garfield in the height of his success
looked upon the earth of his triumph with
sad eyes. He was unable to forget that he
and all he loved were being borne along by
arms mysterious and powerful. All sensitive
minds are pathetic and almost superstitious
in their hours of meditation. The dictates
of reason are not able to counteract fully the
deep attachments of the heart to life and
friends and all the loved ones. When the
great are warm-hearted they are melancholy
and most plaintive. May you all possess such
a pathetic estimate of our earth ; may you
all see the tomb ward march of man, so read
the vanity of riches and fame and home and
love, that you shall be compelled to become
children of God and of Jesus Christ, — thus,
children of the final country that knows no
funeral pageants, no days of bitter disap-
pointment.

IY
CHARLES SUMNER'

THE world has always loved to speak of
the Infinite One as being the " God of
Nations," because there is a greatness involved
in the idea of Nation which makes it seem
worthy of the attention and love of the In-
finite. It is easy for the individual heart,
possessed of ordinary humility, to feel quite
overlooked in the daily administrations of
Providence, but a nation is something so
vast in its interests and in its life which lies
over centuries, that into its great events men
can generally see descending, in love or
wrath, the sublime form of God. Notwith-
standing the most elaborate and conclusive
argument that our Heavenly Father is in all
places and times alike, yet we all go away
from the argument to confess Him sooner at
Waterloo than where a child is playing or a
bird singing ; more visible where slaves are
shouting in a new liberty than where a
fanner turns his furrow or the lonely wood-

1 Died March 11, 1874,
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Charles Sumner

man swings his axe. Thus marking the
habits of the human mind, we may perceive
at least how great a thing is a nation. What
a vast idea it is, that it always claims the
care of the Almighty, and almost compels
the atheist to confess that there is at least a
nation's God.

A nation is a second world into which we
are all born. The first world is only the
good green earth, with its seasons, and food,
and labour, and natural vicissitudes ; but
this is a poor birthplace for a mind or a
soul, for into these poor, brutish arms falls
the Indian child or the young Arab. To be
born into earth alone is a fate that robs a
birthday of all worth. It is only an animal
that is born to earth alone. It is only when
some second world called a " nation " be-
comes the soul's cradle that it becomes de-
sirable to fall heir to life. A nation is a
grand equipment for a career ; it is food,
and clothes, and friends first, and education,
and employment, and culture, and religion
afterwards. It is the atmosphere into which
the many-winged spirit comes; and a bird
might as well spread its wings in a vacuum
as for a human soul to be born away from
the treasured-up virtues of a national life.
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The Message of David Swing

When the rude black face, with retreating
forehead and great thick lips, meets you on
the Southern coast, you know that that
being was born, but you associate with this
knowledge the other fact that he was born
to savage Africa. Great beyond all estimate,
therefore, is the fact of nation, for it shapes
the soul, and is the joy or sorrow of every
being that comes into this existence. As
when, in the setting sun, after a summer
shower, all things, clouds, hills, trees, and
even the very grass and the faces of our
friends standing in the refracted light are
covered with the tinge of gold, so when man
is born into a nation he is instantly bathed
in its light, and sets forth in a double destiny,
that of man and that of citizen ; and it is,
for the most part, the latter destiny that de-
termines the value of life. When Bunyan
saw a culprit ascending the steps to the
gallows, he said : " That were I, but for the
Grace of God ; " but this Grace does not
busy itself only with individuals here and
there, but it marks out a vast realm and
makes it a great, free, civilized state, and
then the millions that come into life in its
blessed confines can, in their later years,
when they realize the value of the great
90

Charles Sumner

fatherland, say, " I was a savage, a Congo
negro, but for the Grace of God."

Next to the grandeur of a planet with a
thousand millions of people upon its bosom,
whirling them along through day and night,
and summer and winter, and youth and
old age, comes the grandeur of a well-
equipped State which, for hundreds of years,
guards the liberty, and industry, and educa-
tion, and happiness of her dependent millions,
crowding her influence in upon them gently
as the atmosphere lies upon the cheek in
June. Her language, her peculiar genius,
her ideals, her religion, her freedom, enwrap
us better than our mother's arms, for the
State enwraps her too, and wreathes her fore-
head with a merit that warrants her office and
her affection. The State is defined to be a

" . . . Sovereign law, that with collected will,
Sits Empress, crowning good, repressing ill.
Smit by her sacred frown
The fiend Dissension like a vapour sinks
And e'en the all dazzling Crown
Hides his faint rays and at her bidding shrinks."

Whence comes this grand instrument
which, as now existing in our continent,
under the flag of liberty, pours around forty
millions of people such a golden air as

The Message of David Swing

no millions ever breathed before ? Who
gathered these flowers that wreathe equally
our cradle, our altar, our homes, and our
whole earthly pilgrimage ? This much of a
reply is given by human experience : Noth-
ing comes to man, of excellence, without
labour. All that man possesses of art, sci-
ence, or literature, or invention, has come by
regular payments made in hard toil. As the
verdure that waves over the whole earth has
come from the daily sacrifice of the sun's
heat, so the glory manifold of each great
nation has come by the path of human sacri-
fice of thought, and toil, and even life ; and
so valuable have been the national ideas,
that, for all the good the world possesses,
there have been fields baptized with the
heart's best blood. Young though many of
the modern free nations may be in their
present name and form, yet back of each
one lie a thousand years of active labour, and
often of deep agony. As geologists now tell
us that before God fitted up this earth for
man, while the mists were rising from its
heated seas, and condensing in the cooler
upper air, there were often awful storms
where the thunder rolled incessantly for a
hundred years ; so each nation which we see
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Charles Sumner

standing forth now in peace and beauty —
England, Germany, America — has emerged
from a thousand-year storm, where the wrath
of man has rolled in thunder for centuries,
and the cruel skies have rained blood. One
of the poets says :

" A thousand years scarce serve to form a state."

And oh ! what years of toil and vicissitude
they are to the brains which stand at the
throne, and to the hearts that stand in the
battle, and to the widow and orphan who
weep when the smoke rolls away and reveals
the dead !

If then a great nation like our own has
come over a two-thousand-year path under a
sky of alternate peace and storm, come along
from free Athens, and free Rome and sacred
Palestine, there must have been all along
guardian angels of its long journey, glorious
leaders of its wilderness march ; souls that
smote rocks for its thirsty multitudes, and
prayed down manna in the still night. The
morals of our day can look back and see
their Seneca, their Confucius, but chiefly
their Divine Jesus ; the art of our era looks
back and beholds its Phidias, its Apelles, its
Angelo, linking the future and the past ;
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The Message of David Swing

poetry and all literature look back and cast
smiles of gratitude to Homer and Thucydides
and Dante ; the law confesses the deep
devotion of Cicero and Justinian as minds
who studied justice when the world seemed
young.

And now, beholding this differentiation of
men by a wise providence of God, so that
each part of the soul's vast vineyard may
have some one to love its vines, we reach
the easy conclusion that the same wisdom
will permit us always to hold in memory and
in love men who, turning aside from other
pursuits, have found in the study and love
and service of their nation their own special
path between the cradle and the grave. It
is a blessed thought that there have risen up
here and there not only hearts that could
weave the sweet songs of a Yirgil, and not
only hands that could paint the pictures of a
Parrhasius, or that could strike the notes of
a Mozart; not only minds that may throw
up a dome of St. Peter's, or that may as-
tonish the world with their invention, but
also other hearts which have loved the idea
of Nation, and have lived and died not in the
arms of a friend, but rather in the arms of
the country. Out of the thoughts and love
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Charles Sumner

and specialization of these great ones we,
humbler children of the State, have all
drawn our happiness and freedom, as the vio-
lets are invited into life by the all-loving sun.
In the week past the grave has opened
suddenly and taken back one of these souls
which seem sent of God to know nothing
else but their country, as Paul knew nothing
else but the Cross. Into that tomb which
grows wider each year and has received
away from our sight Washington and the
Adamses and Jefferson and Clay and Webster
and Lincoln, at last has been gathered one
more name wreathed as heavily as any with
the glorious ideas and honours of our great
Republic. Napoleon loved not a nation, but
his own power. He was a student not of
justice, but of crowns ; he studied how to
destroy other diadems, and of their jewels
weave one for himself.

" The triumph and the vanity,

The rapture of the strife,
The earthquake voice of victory,

To thee the breath of life ;
The sword, the sceptre, and that sway,

Which mail seemed made but to obey,
Wherewith renown was rife,

All quell'd ! Dark Spirit, what must be
The madness of thy memory ! "
95

The Message of David Swing

But the memory of that life just ended has
no madness in it, but is all a remembrance
of honour, and charity, and peace.

It seems especially fitting the day and place
that we should devote this hour to thoughts
over this fresh tomb, for the greatness of Mr.
Sumner's career is strangely interwoven with
some of the noblest ideas of Christianity;
and §this union was not accidental, nor pru-
dential, but spiritual and intellectual, for Mr.
Sumner in his life, devoted to humanity, so
framed all his arguments, and so based them
upon the philosophy of Christ that the per-
petual return of the terms Christianity and
Saviour betrays the fact that much of his
eloquence was only the Sermon upon the
Mount applied, not to the future of the soul,
but to the true, earthly progress of mankind.
If any group of philosophers were to sit
down with the Life of Christ in their hands,
with the desire to elaborate a political con-
stitution from its pages, among the many
principles they would bring forth we should
at once certainly find these — peace, justice,
and equality. From justice would instantly
come liberty. Now of that eventful life
whose untimely ending drapes this day with
sorrow, these three Christian ideas, peace,

Charles Sumner

liberty, and equality, were the opening and
final strain, the matin and the vesper. The
public career of Mr. Sumner began by that
unrivalled oration spoken thirty years ago
upon peace as the source of national gran-
deur ; and without any deviation, any falter-
ing along this path, he is found at last on the
border of death, asking Congress not to paint
upon its flags of the present and future the
names of battles where brothers fought. His
life was all set to one music, and it was a
heavenly strain without discord.

But before I ask you to think of those
three great ideas, in which Mr. Sumner did
great service for the Christianity out of which
he took the ideas, and the Christlike spirit,
too, permit me to apologize, so far as it may
be necessary, for the marble coldness which
has long been associated with this eminent
character. Let us empty our minds of this
prejudice. A public man, writing a private
letter since the death of this senator, says :
" He was cold as a statue. He was a child
of principles and books, and consequently
had little in common with the humanities of
life. ... I cannot speak of him generally in
this regard ; but in the few times in which I
dined with him at Mr. Lincoln's table, he
97

The Message of David Swing

was a pleasant dinner companion, and con*
versed happily and instructively; but such
times were only little outbreaks of sunlight.
In the main, he was behind the cloud, and,
while full of gentle humanity, he moved
among individuals evolving an austere sense
of superiority." Against the truth of these
statements from one who had the opportunity
and the discrimination for reading well the
qualities of this distinguished man, we would
say nothing; indeed, the portraiture just
given may be confessed to be sufficiently
correct. But that he was capable of deep
friendship is fully seen in his attachment to
the loved President, whose house was so dear
to him that he repaired there daily as to a
sacred home where he loved all and was also
deeply loved.

Passing by this inquiry, I only wish to
remind you that all the great intellectual
development which the world has ever seen
has been reached at the cost of the heart.
" Where the treasure is," says the Bible,
" there the heart will be also " ; and hence,
when an old scholar of the dark ages found
his love of thought increasing, he began to
withdraw from the streets, and to find, in
some monastic cell, all of the world that any
98

Charles Sumner

longer remained in his heart ; and although
the dark ages are gone, and the monasteries
are dast, yet the principle remains that,
when the intellect weds itself fully to cer-
tain paths of study and toil, the heart soon
sunders the other many sweet and beautiful
associations of the wide world, and casts its
love upon that realm only to which the in-
tellect may have wedded itself for better or
for worse, for richer or poorer. It is an un-
conscious sacrifice which genius is always
compelled to make ; but it is no more visible
over the grave of Sumner than over the
grave of Mill in philosophy, or Pascal in
metaphysics, or Angelo in art, or Cicero in
law and letters. It is written in all history
that a life of thought is a constant warfare
against a life of sociability and cheerfulness
and love. Instead of recalling the marble
coldness of past illustrious men as a blemish
or a fault in their character, we only indicate
a common fact, and we would bury the de-
fect forever under offerings of gratitude,
that there have come here and there souls
which, for the development of great, useful
ideas, have been able to abandon what we
mortals in a humbler vale call the varied
pleasures of life. But they have not so
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The Message of David Swing

much lost happiness as exchanged that of
sense for that of spirit.

Turning aside now from this apology, let
us rejoice that if it was the fate of the
lamented senator to live for only a part of
earth and for only a part of religion, that it
pleased him to live for so magnificent a part
of both politics and religion as is found in
the words peace, justice, and liberty.

It was not Mr. Sumner, you remember,
who advised the partnership of Bibles and
rifles in the early days of Kansas. No, in
all this forty years of public life, Mr. Sumner
stood by the power of argument, of light, of
Christian civilization alone. His hymn was
the poet's psalm of peace :

" Were half the power that fills the world with terror,

Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals or forts.

41 The warrior's name would be a name abhorred,

And every nation that should lift again
Its hand against a brother, on its forehead
Would wear, forever more, the curse of Cain."

In the pulpits of the whole land the Gospel
doctrines had, for the most part, been applied
to only individual welfare, and chiefly to
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Charles Sumner

that welfare beyond the confines of states —
beyond the grave. Afraid, for the most
part, to preach what they called politics ;
and having, to an alarming extent, such a
bad politics that it was perhaps fortunate
that they remained silent even by a theo-
logical mistake, the Christian ministry had,
in the last generations, left the gospel of
nations to be preached by the few disciples
of William Penn and by such virtual Quakers
as Channing and Whittier, and Sumner, the
greatest of all. Upon him there was no
restraint. No false creed, no temporary
policy such as influenced Webster and Clay,
no fear of violence, no fear of public scorn,
either from Boston or New Orleans, ever
held him in any conceivable chain, but from
him, the freest man our country ever had in
its dark days, came the gospel of nations in
all its Bethlehem beauty of truth and spirit.
In the present, and more yet, in the near and
far future, the pulpit will confess that
Charles Sumner was a minister at its altar
in dark days when it was afraid, and in doc-
trines to the grandeur of which it had not
the intellect, nor the courage, nor the hu-
manity to ascend. Penn and Channing and
Sumner came in with that part of Christian-
101

The Message of David Swing

ity which belongs to the constitution of na-
tions ; and when we remember that a grand,
free, enlightened State is the land in which
the Cross can ever be reared with most suc-
cess, the orators who, upon the field of
statesmanship, apply to society the three
Christian doctrines of peace, liberty and
justice, must be confessed to be standing
very near the holiest ministers of religion.
As the church helped Mr. Sumner, gave him
hearts willing to listen to his long argument,
so he helped the church by sending back to
it men who evermore tried to combine the
character of Christian with the character of
citizen.

But Mr. Sumner's attachment to peace was
no more absorbing and unbending than his
devotion to liberty. For liberty is twin
sister of peace, as bondage is the companion
of violence. As Franklin gloried in saying
"Where liberty is there is my country,"
Sumner equally gloried in saying "Where
liberty is there is my party." Down this
channel of freedom, for white slaves in
Barbary, and for black slaves in America, he
poured a torrent of eloquence for twenty-five
years, a stream of argument, which gathering
up the wisdom of Greece and Rome, the ex-
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Charles Sumner

perience of England, the battle-shouts of
Marathon and Bunker Hill, the blest vision
of all the poets, the longings of Washington
and Jefferson, and then bedecking the stream
with flowers of a gorgeous rhetoric growing
upon either bank, moved along like an
Amazon towards the sea. It has been said
recently by a public man, that Mr. Sumner
"surpassed all statesmen in the love and
study of the right." It was this deep pre-
possession that led him to espouse the cause
of the slave. Words which he himself applied
to Channing thirty years ago return now to
settle upon his own forehead. " Follow my
white plume," said the chivalrous monarch
of France. Follow the right, more resplend-
ent than plume or oriflamme, was the watch-
word of Sumner. But all this long history
you know well, for in this hour when death
has come to quicken our memory and love,
an hour which makes an enemy a friend, all
that past struggle for the slave's freedom, and
the discord of the Missouri Compromise down
to the death of Mr. Lincoln, a tragedy which
closed the long, awful drama, flashes through
your hearts with no detail of sadness left out.
Kecall the great pageant and see this white
face above the common mortals.
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The Message of David Swing

But to-day, we can only turn aside from
the usual themes of the sacred desk to bless
the heavenly Father for this child that came
in the name of that form of civilization which
finds its best exponent in the Saviour of man-
kind, and bless Him that there was one tongue
which for a generation made the best elo-
quence of this free land beam with the light of
Him whose gospel is not only a perfect salva-
tion, but a perfect civilization, — the vital air,
not only of a saint, but of a citizen. And we
cannot close these thoughts without asking
you to read in this urn of perishable dust, but
of imperishable memory, a lesson of hope
which may serve us all in coming days, per-
haps of the country, but surely of our own
heart. When government, and pulpit, and
press were voiceless and hopeless as to a time
when the Nation's flag should be freed from
its last reproach, this mental sight which is
closed now saw plainly in the future a day
when all the States would be free, and when
the national banner would proclaim liberty
and justice wherever it should wave. His
was a hopefulness which nothing but death
could abate ; and blest with such a prophetic,
almost inspired sense, he, in all the years of
our civil war, was calm, and was to Mr.
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Charles Sumner

Lincoln, upon whose mind and heart a burden
rested which would have wearied an Atlas
accustomed to uphold the globe, a daily
messenger of faith and hope in both man and
God. Perhaps the marble-like nature of the
statesman was a peace and strength to a
president whose heart was always full of ten-
derness and melancholy strangely mingled.
That immense power of hope which has
always attended men of ideals, the angel of
their need, accompanied Mr. Sumner in all
hours, and held him up far above the discord
of the passing time. A poem which he
greatly loved shows us what kind of a hymn
sounded in the sky over his daily toil. It
inspired him in the night watches :

" There's a fount about to stream,
There's a light about to beam,
There's a warmth about to glow,
There's a flower about to blow.
There's a midnight blackness changing

Into gray ;
Men of thought and men of action,

Clear the way !"

Oh! why may not the pulpit and each

Christian rise to this calm atmosphere of a

trust in God, and as this statesman always

saw liberty and justice about to come down

I05

The Message of David Swing

out of God's sky, why may not the soldier of
the cross daily say to his soul

" There's a fount about to stream,
There's a light about to beam,''

and live in this magnificent hope ?

But our time has passed. Much of our
country's mental and moral glory has gone
down in past years. We seem to have
only an evening horizon into which golden
suns sink, but from which none arise. The
melancholy gate of death by which these
souls depart seems wider than the gates of
life by which such glorious beings are march-
ing towards our bereaved hearts. Yet this
apparent triumph of the grave may come
from the fact that we can see the past in all
its desolation, but cannot unveil the future
and see its compensating good. We can only
hope that the gates of God's mercy are as
wide as the gates of His death, and that the
solemn West into which these lights are sink-
ing from our sky may, by its shadows,
remind us that there is an Eastern heaven
radiant with divine love, upon whose bosom
other orbs will appear, resplendent with
peace, justice, and liberty.

1 06

V

WENDELL PHILLIPS1

AS these deaths of the great occur, they
become more and more painful, be-
cause the group of heroes grows smaller, and
the loss of one more great soul is the more
deeply felt. It has not been many years since
our Nation was rich in the style of manhood
represented by him who has just been buried.
We could see, not long ago, Chase and Par-
ker, Sumner and Henry Wilson and Lincoln
and Greeley and Gerrit Smith and Garrison,
and others of similar power ; but as the years
have gone by, these have gone with them, and
so small at last has the group become, that
upon each new invasion of death, we all won-
der if any one remains to be a golden link
between the present and the past. So rapidly
do these noble chieftains fall into the tomb
that many of the young minds of to-day will
never see any one of these noble faces, but
will be compelled to find their souls only in

1 Died February 2, 1884.
107

The Message of David Swing

history. Those of you who have seen and
heard all these great Americans, from Web-
ster to Phillips, may well be proud now of
such a memory. They surpassed the sculp-
tor and painter and poet and musician, for
while those artists give us the decorations
and pleasures of life, these statesmen helped
lay the foundations of liberty, and hence
of all that leans upon liberty for support.
Art, education, commerce, industry, science,
and religion, have drawn life from these
master-builders in the political temple. An-
gelo and Raphael in art are outdone by
these pioneers in the career of our republic.
Art comes only to a few ; a great country
empties her blessings upon all the millions,
and what blessings they are !

A religious, political mind like that of
Wendell Phillips possesses in the formative
years of a nation a worth we can with diffi-
culty measure ; certainly we cannot rate it
at too high a price. In 1836 this man, then
fresh from the schools and college, and with
a mind blessed far beyond the lot of common
mortals, turned aside from profession and
traffic, to give his hand and heart to one
single cause, the emancipation of his coun-
try's slaves. From 1836 to 1863, that is, for
108

Wendell Phillips

twenty-seven years, he turned the river of
his eloquence down through that barren and
dangerous plain. For not many men of
even Boston birth and culture touched foot
in that day upon the land of negro freedom.
It was like the forest that lay before Dante
in his dream, full of wild, ravenous beasts —
the wolf of avarice, the leopard of sin, the
lion of power. The merchants were in-
fluenced by the wolf of avarice, the fashion-
able people by the leopard of sin, the poli-
ticians by the lion of power. Dante, in pres-
ence of these beasts, determined to rise
above them and dream of, and visit heaven.
So Phillips, in his glory of youth and genius,
resolved to rise above all these destroyers
and find those heights where no wild beast
has a lair — heights towards the throne of
peace and right. To have made such a
choice seems easy now, but had this entire
audience been citizens of Boston at that
date, it may be that no one of us would have
offered hand or heart to the pleading slave.
The tide of New England sentiment flowed
towards the cotton which grew at the bid-
ding of the slave ; and to touch slavery was
assumed the same as making the grass to
grow in the manufacturing streets. Thus an
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The Message of David Swing

Abolitionist was deemed an enemy of the
land once occupied by the Puritans.

When, in about 1840, some one became
bold enough to bring Frederick Douglass
into Boston to preach in a prominent church
upon the condition and rights of the slaves,
no one dared to invite him home to dinner
after the morning service ; but all left the
eloquent ex-slave to pass the afternoon
among the tombstones in the churchyard —
perhaps stones in memory of those who had
sailed from Europe or England to establish
liberty. It was at such a time of bondage to
commerce and manufactures and of cruelty
towards man, that Mr. Phillips made the
vow of consecration to the cause of freedom.

Our country thus suffers the loss of one
who, born in the highest rank of society, de-
clined its luxury and exclusiveness, and,
Christlike, went down to the humble world
of the African to be his friend. It was an
immense gain for the general cause of hu-
manity ; for not only came thus to that cause
a warm heart and a brave soul, but there
came the finest orator of the century— a
mind as calm as the blue sky, as fascinating
as the summer time, and yet as powerful as
the earthquakes and torrents and tempests,
no

Wendell Phillips

Very often the poor of earth have had to
accept of the services of some man whose
mind was untrained, whose reason was weak,
whose judgment was quick and ill founded,
whose information small, but such was not
the misfortune of our African millions in
their later years. There came to their aid
the best sons the world could produce —
Theodore Parker, Horace Mann, Thomas
Starr King, Charles Sumner and Wendell
Phillips. From such brains and souls there
poured forth for twenty-five years a stream
of matchless eloquence which prepared the
Nation for that day when ideas would be
compelled to make a final struggle upon the
battle-field. In the first years of the liberty
movement the slave had few friends in the
North, but what he had were of rare quality.
Slavery held the trade of JSfew England ;
freedom gradually won her intellect and
heart ; slavery held the cotton-mill, freedom
the library ; slavery was represented by a
policeman with a metallic star on his breast
and a club in his hand ; freedom was repre-
sented by an orator whose forehead was as
proud as that of Apollo and whose lips were
like those of Pericles ; the ship-load of cotton
from the Georgia plantations became at last
in

The Message of David Swing

less valuable than the divine philosophy upon
New England soil, and in the sharp conflict
between merchant and orator the orator won.

Gone are all those days of mingled light
and darkness, hope and fear, great virtues
and great sins, but this recent death has re-
called the past, and may well awaken in our
bosoms gratitude to God that He gave to our
Nation the men needed in its successive hours.
We should be dull and ungrateful children
should we not see the many-coloured glory of
those past years and realize that He who
planted flowers and made the ocean and the
stars is the One who created oratory out of
the dust and clothed it also with beauty and
power. Oratory is the universe bursting out
into speech.

It is not a pertinent inquiry whether Mr.
Phillips might not have accomplished more
for the times had he harmonized more with
the local and central Government and had
he been more closely allied to senates and
cabinets. Such questions belong rather to
some shop of biography or history. Two
thoughts in that matter will suffice us to-day ;
the one, that his life as it stands was so full
of the true and good that we should seem
greedy beggars should we demand more. To
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Wendell Phillips

come along with our perfect ideal of a states-
man or a philanthropist, and to set about
comparing our golden and divine mask with
this dead human face would be only an illus-
tration of our meanness and injustice. In-
stead of coming forward with our portrait
painted after the fact, after the long battle
and the death, we should rather come with
the wonder what heroism or perfection we
would have shown had we lived in that New
England city while those times of dull con-
science and bridled tongue were passing
slowly by. Nor can we determine now just
how great a crime it was not to vote at the
elections nor seek the duties of a government
which could open its new Territories to the
system of slavery, and which could compel a
Northern man to help capture and return a
fugitive from bondage. So difficult are these
problems that we may well thank God for
what of pure truth and nobleness there came
into the Nation's mind from these now word-
less lips. Their eloquence was at least of
grand quality, as powerful and beautiful as
it was useful.

The second apologetic thought is this —
that no age calls for men of similar mental
and emotional structure, for men who will

The Message of David Swing

all vote and seek and hold office and blend
into one common picture. In the whole
history of our race there has been a constant
call for a variety which would not permit
any two leaders to resemble each other.
Hence biographers can with difficulty find
parallels. They attempt to find some resem-
blance between Dante and Milton, or Savo-
narola and Luther, Burke and "Webster, but
after rhetoric and research have toiled hard
at the comparison, there stands on the one
hand Savonarola, and on the other Luther,
with a measureless and mysterious space be-
tween. Nature never repeats any form of
greatness. Plato was not Socrates, Yirgil
was not Homer, Washington was not Crom-
well, Wendell Phillips was not Abraham
Lincoln. Thus moves onward the vast
human race, lifting up its vast sons in her
loving arms, but with no duplicate ever of
face, or brain, or heart. And thus did the
march of events train and inform and call
and adopt and employ for a lifetime this
man now of world- wide fame. His age cre-
ated him for its special service.

Nothing more loudly proclaims the being
of a God than His perpetual procession of
such gifted mortals. Look at a single group
114

Wendell Phillips

of them as springing up in one single city ;
Everett, Webster, Sumner, Longfellow, Emer-
son, and in all a large assemblage of titanic
brothers, able by joining hands to move the
world. And to that one city add other
places on our globe, where man has unfolded
his power, places between London and old
Athens ; add names from Pitt to Demos-
thenes, and what holy ground our earth be-
comes ! We forget the sins and follies of the
common millions, and pass easily from these
giants in mind and morals to the presence of
a Creator. Listening to their spoken words
or reading their volumes, we realize at once
the grandeur of man, the divineness of his
exploits, and the probable glory of his final
destiny. While near the common roaring of
wheels, or while amid the perishable decora-
tions of fashion, or in the midst of its vivacity
and laughter, man may seem an ephemeral
insect, but the scene all changes when we
meet the great in their ordained paths, their
forms seem larger than life, and their faces
seem to contain some mysterious proofs of
immortality.

When Wendell Phillips began his public
life evangelical Christianity did not look
upon him as an ally. It was thought that

The Message of David Swing

such orators as Parker and Phillips would
lead thousands to spiritual ruin, and some
clergymen even prayed that Providence
might remove Theodore Parker from this
existence. These two were counted as the
Church's enemies ; but such have been the
changes in thought and argument and in the
questions of debate that no doubt the Chris-
tian world rejoices to-day when it recalls an
eloquence which founded itself upon the
being of the heavenly Father, and the pres-
ence everywhere of a " higher law." The
wit and anecdote and irony and awful
denunciation of Phillips seldom ran onward
many minutes without some appeal to the
existence and justice of God. When the tele-
graph flashed to Boston that Mr. Lincoln
had been elected and a joyous crowd as-
sembled in Tremont Temple to hear what
Mr. Phillips would say, he closed his memo-
rable speech by these words of new hope :
" Once plant deep in the Nation's heart the
love of right, let there grow out of it a firm
purpose of duty, and then from the higher
plane of Christian manhood we can put
aside on the right hand and left all narrow,
childish and mercenary considerations. For
us, the children of a pure civilization, the
116

Wendell Phillips

pioneers of a Christian future, it is for us to
found a capitol whose corner-stone shall be
justice, whose top stone liberty ; within the
sacred precincts of whose Holy of Holies
shall dwell One who is no respecter of per-
sons, but hath made of one blood all the
nations of the earth. Crowding to the
shelter of its stately arches I see old and
young, learned and ignorant, rich and poor,
native and foreign, Pagan, Jew and Christian,
black and white, in one glad, harmonious,
triumphant procession."

In that far-off day the Church was not able
to see religion where it could not see Ortho-
doxy, and therefore the deep Christianity of
Parker and Mann and Phillips was not con-
fessed ; but in our day atheism has invaded
the field of eloquence and has created a black
cloud upon which the belief of Phillips bends
plainly all its colours of righteousness and
love and hope. All that anti-slavery which
echoed through the Nation for twenty-five
years was based upon the laws of the Al-
mighty, and what confession the Church
could not make while those men were living
it will make at last over their graves.

In those years which lay between 1840 and
1860 the languishing minds of public men
117

The Message of David Swing

and private citizens, of preachers and writers,
needed plain words, sharp and rude. It was
a period of general hesitation and weakness.
Into such a dead atmosphere Phillips moved
with the vehemence of a storm. No man,
living or dead, equals this name in the power
of cutting speech, the power of statement, of
citation of instance, of application, and of
never bending pursuit of one end. In the
hottest days of the struggle the eloquence of
Wendell Phillips ran not like a mad torrent
but as a deep stream of fire. It scorched
what it touched of wrong and folly. It was
well that not all were like him, for we needed
the tenderness of Lincoln as much as this
volcanic flame; but Mr. Phillips performed
his part in the drama of liberty, and per-
formed it well.

It will become an impressive picture in
history, — that of this husband and wife ded-
icating themselves, their time and fortune
to one noble enterpise ; so noble that it dwarfs
the common ends and aids of to-day. This
work displaced their love of furniture and
drapery and silks and broadcloth and fashion-
able life, and arose before them as sweet as
the Star of Bethlehem before the wise men of
the East. These two said to Liberty : " We
118

Wendell Phillips

have seen thy star and have come to worship
thee," and opening their treasures of intellect
and soul, they presented unto this Liberty
their gold and frankincense and myrrh.

Beyond doubt Mr. Phillips made many
mistakes, and was not as acute to measure
the value of the Union as to feel the wrong
of slavery. He could see a poor man or poor
woman or child further than he could see a
Nation. Demosthenes went around with
his eloquence to induce the Greek states to
unite; he failed, and Greece was ruined.
Phillips on the opposite urged the American
States to separate ; he failed and the Nation
was saved. But after we have estimated at
their full demerit all the errors of this man,
he remains the purest and strongest friend
the lower classes ever possessed on this side
the sea. He could not see anything ex-
cept the rights of man. What the classics
had recorded upon that subject, the apho-
risms in the past or in the present, in Cicero
or De Tocqueville, in incidents, in history,
the great or wandering poems of any place
or time having liberty and equality in their
words or verses, sank into memory and came
forth in his speeches as at Arethusa an un-
derground river bursts forth.
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The Message of David Swing

But all this brilliant and lofty and cut
ting oratory has passed by. It was over-
thrown not by this new grave but by the
freedom of man and by the grand reunion of
the States. Thus this eloquence ended with
the ending of its cause. "What gratitude
should fill our hearts that the Nation needs
no more such an oratory of wormwood, but
asks now for the literature of a brotherhood
and for lives full of all noble action ! Per-
haps in years not far away the South herself
when she shall look with pride upon her en-
larged cities and industries and upon millions
as rich and happy as her sky is gentle and
blue, will count among her friends the name
of him who once seemed such a reckless
enemy. The apparent foes of to-day are
often the real friends of to-morrow.

What are the inferences from this life?
One is that the cause of man, which pos-
sessed such simplicity in the former gener-
ation, possesses still all that physical and
spiritual worth. There is no end to this
service to society. Washington's camp on
the Delaware would have been in vain had
it not been followed by the schoolhouse and
the church on the Ohio and Mississippi and
the Lakes. Thus, each step of a great man
1 20

Wendell Phillips

involves another step by a successor. Cicero
said that a man who helps save a country is
as worthy as one who founded it. Thus,
merit is a golden chain of which each gener-
ation is a link. The chain falls weak and
worthless when any generation makes a
feeble link. The task resting upon the new
men and new women — all children when
Parker and Phillips were in all their glory
of wrath and love — is one of the same old
greatness, that of leading onward and yet
onward the public, for which so many lived
and died.

A second inference is one of both rhetoric
and religion. The world calls "Wendell
Phillips eloquent. What is eloquence? A
difficult question ; but we may approach it by
indirection. What is great music ? Certainly
not a dance or a waltz, because the theme
or emotion is too childish. A Marseillaise
hymn will illustrate great music because all
that pathos and beauty of sound reposes
upon the worth and history of impressive
France. What is architecture ? Surely not
the building of a bookcase or a fireplace or a
portico; but the rearing of some structure
under which is some great thought, a library,
a gallery, a kingdom, a worship of the Al-
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The Message of David Swing

mighty. The greater the idea, the greater
the architecture ; hence most of the won-
derful piles of earth repose upon religion —
two worlds, the one here and the one here-
after. Such thoughts may bring us near to
a definition. Eloquence is the adequate
treatment of a vast theme. The theme sends
its greatness up into the words as the falling
waters of Niagara send into the woods afar
in the still night the strange outline of their
thundering. A great mind treating a great
theme are the two elements needed to make
eloquence. In Phillips these met. In "Web-
ster they met for a time, but afterwards they
parted. They are seen joining in Burke and
Pitt. They combined in Robert Ingersoll
when he spoke in memory of the soldiers
and saw " the past rise up before him like a
dream," but they part when the same gifted
speaker discourses against the being of a
God and the hope of a second life ; the great
mind runs on from hour to hour, but the
theme is wanting and there is no oratory
possible in the case. Eloquence is therefore
a great treatment of a great subject.

Phillips saw the human race all standing
together as children of God. God had made
their world ; had made the soil, the seasons,

122

Wendell Phillips

the human hand and heart and genius, had
given laws whose obedience would bring
happiness ; and from such a premise Wendell
Phillips moved outward towards the vision
of Human Liberty and Equality. His mem-
ory bids us remember ever that glorious word,
FBEEDOM.

123

YI

HENEY WAED BEECHEK1

THIS is a peculiar day [March 12, 1887].
It is the first Sunday of more than
fifty years whose morning has not called Mr.
Beecher to the sanctuary ; the first morning
in which he could not obey such a blessed
invitation. In a series of spring-times which,
in the retrospect, seems interminable, Mr.
Beecher has responded like a child to the
invitations of sunshine, bird, and blossom to
grasp anew God's world and man's world ;
he has rushed joyfully forth for more than
seventy years and has extracted from the
seasons colours and perfumes to be woven
into his speech. This spring ends all the
running out and in of that soul, and we have
come upon a Sunday and a March which
sing no longer any kind of carol or psalm to
that heart. In those budding months, when
Freedom was attempting to find a home in
Kansas, this orator of the people was in our

1 Died March 8, 1887.
I24

Henry Ward Beecher

world ; in that March when Mr. Lincoln was
journeying to Washington, Mr. Beecher was
here, visible as the continent. It is no com-
mon event that we have now come to the
end of this long, lasting and brilliant spec-
tacle.

Mr. Beecher's greatest years were only
twenty in number, lying between 1845 and
1865. That group of twenty years was made
tremendous by the great ideas which lay
beneath them. These great years would
have been thirty had not his large themes
died from fulfillment. We cannot find fault
with good dreams which suddenly end by
coming true. His mind and body were
equal to a longer service, but England needed
no longer any instruction as to America ;
Kansas needed no more intercession; the
slaves needed no more of the eloquence of
abolition. The cathedral of liberty had been
completed and the architect had only to go
inside and become a worshipper. For twenty
years this wonderful man worked for the
human race, then he wrought twenty more
years for his parish, this last score of summers
being also full of power, but not to be com-
pared with the time when the toil was for
the Nation, and the tasks the greatest upon

12*)

The Message of David Swing

earth. In the greater period he seemed
under the employ of the people to plead their
cause in politics and religion. His pulpit
moved around in the daily press, and was on
the banks of the Ohio and the Missouri,
while, as the old Scottish clans sprang forth
from the bushes when their chieftain gave a
blast on his trumpet, the audiences of this
evangelist issued at his call from all the
hills of the East and the waving grass of the
West. In times of deep distress the slaves'
souls cried out with the Scotch poet :

" Ob, for a blast of that dread born,
On Fontarabian echoes borne ! "

The public service of Daniel Webster did
not cover so wide a space in time ; nor did
the great career of Abraham Lincoln take in
so many circles of the sun ; to Mr. Beecher
must be given the fame and gratitude for a
battle long fought, and well fought, to the
final perfect triumph.

The philosophy of his history was about of
this outline. He was an inborn, vast genius,
so sensitive that he became Americanized
easily and deeply. As Angelo under Italy
and the Medici became coloured by art, as
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Henry Ward Beecher

Goethe absorbed all the sweet odours and be-
wildering fancy of Germany, as Shakespeare
caught all of his age in his wide mental drag-
net, thus Henry Ward Beecher was American-
ized, and from his brain came forth an
American Politics and an American Religion.
These two structures arose at the same time,
whether side by side, or one within the other,
cannot be affirmed. You may if you choose
say the new politics was the external temple,
the new religion a golden altar within. It
will matter little what form of figure the
thought may assume, the truth remains that
under the hand of this one workman there
sprang up a new form of both politics and re-
ligion. The rationalism and humanity which
led slaves up out of bondage could not do
otherwise than lead God's children out of old
Puritanism with its election, reprobation, and
literal and eternal fire. For twenty years
without intermission rolled forth this elo-
quence about justice as between man and
man and as between God and man.

The son inherited from his father the dis-
position and the courage to become practical
and do the best things for an age and in the
best light of an age. Lyman Beecher came
into this world for the purpose of seeing it.
127

The Message of David Swing

His eye was never closed, his tongue never
tied. His speech was clear and sharp. He
found drinking whiskies and brandies a
habit of even the clergy. The moment he
saw this serpent's head he struck at it. The
clergy had listened to it as did their weak
mother, but when Lyman Beecher came
along he denounced the serpent as a falsifier,
and began pounding it.

A few of his words will tell us how mental
qualities are transmitted sometimes from
parent to child. When Henry was a little
boy the father said of intemperance : " Our
vices are digging the grave of our liberties
and preparing to entomb our glory. We
may despise admonition, but our destruction
slumbereth not. The enormous consumption
of ardent spirits in our land will produce
neither minds nor bodies like those which are
the offspring of temperance and virtue. Our
constitutions, civil and religious, have lost
that domestic discipline and official vigilance
in magistrates which render obedience easy
and habitual. Drunkards reel through the
streets day after day and year after year
with] entire impunity." Such were the lan-
guage, the clear diction, the practical gospel
of the father. The son would have taken
128

Henry Ward Beecher

this question of temperance had not the slave
become more conspicuous than the drunkard,
and had not the question of a temperate
Nation been overwhelmed by the question
of national existence. The father had said
" Let us have no grog-shop in the Eepublic ; "
the son said " Let us first have a republic."
Thus the clear stream of healing eloquence
which began in the old New England father
widened and deepened in the bosom of the
child, but it was the same river flowing for
the healing of the Nation.

When Henry was a young man studying
theology in Cincinnati in the seminary of
which his father was the theological head,
some clergyman arose in the surrounding
darkness and arraigned the father for hold-
ing and teaching heresy. The heresy lay in
teaching that the will of the natural man
possessed some freedom of choice ; that
Christ's atonement oifered its merits to all ;
that eternal death did not come to us because
of Adam's sin. The trial was an effort to
make the Nineteenth Century conform to the
barbarian wisdom of the Fifteenth, to make
the Mississippi Valley love the asceticism of
the old desert, the fatalism of the old East.
In this trial came as a collateral issue an
129

The Message of David Swing

opinion regarding the right of holding prop-
erty in slaves. As Lyman Beecher shrunk
somewhat from the old dogmas, the son
doubled the emotion and fled from this old
schoolism, as he himself said, " sick of the
whole medley." " How I hated this abyss
of whirling controversy which seemed full
of all manner of evil things, with everything
in it, indeed, but Christ ! " "When he began
to preach at times across the river in Ken-
tucky, to about thirty or forty people, some
hearer said : "He was a smart young man
but he harped all the time upon one thing —
the sympathy of Christ." But this was the
kind of harping which the Nation most
needed. The slave-master needed the spirit
of Christ, the slave needed Christian sym-
pathy, the sinner needed the intercession and
persuasion of Christ, the drunkard needed the
Christian manhood. Thus the young clergy-
man's religion shaping itself in 1838 became
from necessity both a religion and a politics
because the greatest question in politics in
those times was a religious question.

There is now a generation in active life in

our land who did not see the uprising of this

eminent man, and hence they cannot measure

the height of his well-earned fame. Our

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Henry Ward Beecher

land is not mourning for a great writer :
Irving and Macaulay had more historic lore
and literary grace than Mr. Beecher pos-
sessed ; Longfellow more and better poetry ;
Lamartine and Coleridge could surpass him in
describing nature ; Winkelmann and Ruskin
were greater in delineating merit and demerit
in art. A heart or a mind of a type differing
from all these immortals has found the end
in death. Beecher joined the benevolence
of a Wilberforce to the eloquence of a Henry
Clay or a Webster; he did not have an
eloquence that could express history, but an
eloquence that could make it. A Macaulay
could write a page, but a Beecher could help
make the Nation that must fill the page.
He made facts for eloquence to record.

When this influential manhood began, our
Nation was divided into two very hostile
sections. The South had become so alarmed
regarding its peculiar property that a North-
ern man having a known love of liberty
did not dare travel in the South. The
Northern merchants were so anxious to
retain the cotton and sugar trade of the
South that they all frowned upon any
politics which numbered freedom among its
ideas, and they would mob or burn a church

The Message of David Swing

which contained the disciples of a Christian
liberty and equality. The students in Dart-
mouth College mobbed free-soil speakers ; the
President sympathized with the students.
Churches, schoolhouses, asylums, and homes
of coloured people in the North were burned
to check the spread of hope among the
Africans in the South. Twelve buildings
were burned in New York ; one large church
and many homes in Cincinnati ; forty houses
and two churches in Philadelphia. Pennsyl-
vania Hall, built for anti-slavery meetings,
was burned down, along with its valuable
library, while Mayor and Council offered no
protection and no word of sympathy. White
men were imprisoned in Boston for preach-
ing Abolitionism. In 1837 a slave had been
burned to death over a slow fire in St. Louis,
and for denouncing such atrocity the Eev.
Elijah P. Lovejoy, of t]iis State [Illinois], was
mobbed to death.

It was in such days, reaching from 1830
to 1860, that the hot oratory of Mr. Beecher
was fabricated like the bolts of Jupiter in
the infernal shop of Yulcan. Thence came
also the equipment of Dr. Cheever, Phillips,
Parker and Sumner. The age sharpened
their speech, condensed their style, and
132

Henry Ward Beech er

poured in the heroism and passion which
make martyrs. Of all these men Mr. Beeclier
was the most visible, because his pulpit
brought him each week before the people.
His logic, his simple style, his illustrations,
his pathos, his hope, made his words fly
straight as arrows to the heart. This vast
plea for universal freedom was well sustained
for twenty years, and beginning in our West
it reached its zenith in England, when, in
1863, he had to teach the horrors of slavery
to the nation which had produced Cowper
and Wilberforce, but had forgotten them.
He embodied the new genius of the United
States. He lived in 1840 the life our Nation
reached thirty years afterwards. Boston
railways built a mean, plain car for negroes
to ride in. It was called the " Jim Crow "
car. Charles Lennox Redmond, an educated
coloured man, entertained in England by
persons of rank and fame, and commissioned
by O'Connell and Father Mathew to bear
greetings from liberty in England to liberty
in America, found on going from Boston to
Salem, his home, that he must not take a
good car, but must ride in the " Jim Crow "
car. In such a time Mr. Beecher began to
ask the coloured man to sit on his platform
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The Message of David Swing

and in his church, and thus the " negro car "
was met in equity by the refuge of the great-
est pulpit the world possessed.

In 1835, while Mr. Beecher was looking
out of his soul window with his powerful
vision and tender nature, he saw in the
Charleston Courier a notice of a public sale
of slaves to satisfy a mortgage held by the
Presbyterian Theological Seminary of South
Carolina ; he read also that the estate of the
Kev. Dr. Furman was to be sold at auction —
" the farm, a large theological library, twenty-
seven negroes, some of them very prime, two
mules, one horse, and an old wagon." In
those days the Episcopal Bishop of Virginia,
Dr. Meade, had published some sermons to
slaves. One great thought was that they
must bear well correction, and even if cor-
rected when not guilty of the offense, they
must bear the flogging in meekness and
assign the whipping to some other transgres-
sion which had been concealed from these
masters in the Lord.

It was high time for religion to reach out
its hand to the slave. Oh, the joy our hearts
should all feel that these sad facts are all so
far back of us that they must be sought for
in the records of almost forgotten history !
134

Henry Ward Beecher

The slave block, the whip, and the slave are
gone from our land forever !

Thus, if the new generation would make a
true estimate of the public man who has just
died, it must reproduce the scene which sur-
rounded that preacher when his mind and
heart were first espousing the cause of man
and Christ. All wonder will then cease that
his religion became simply that of Christ,
and that his style admitted of no obscurity
and no cowardice. His mind, one of the
greatest ever made, came to an age which
asked for simplicity, for logic, for only prac-
tical doctrine, for infinite sympathy and fear-
lessness. Mr. Beecher had these things to
give, and he accepted the call from that
period. He did not perform all the enlight-
ened toil of the day, but he performed a
tremendous work, and now, when his grave is
made in a Nation which is a unit, a Nation
dedicated indeed to Liberty, a Nation whose
South is pressing on towards industry, wealth,
and education — a Republic whose name is
now respected by every throne and every
cottage — that grave ought to catch from the
whole country mingled flowers and tears.

These great years terminated with the
triumph of freedom. In that long reach of
135

The Message of David Swing

time made long by the fullness of thrilling
events, this pulpit orator had helped to re-
model the world's sermon, its gospel and its
politics. He had made the sermon less me-
chanical, less dry, less narrow, less mournful,
more human, more sympathetic, more orna-
mental, more able to compete with the
worldly literature of the present. He opened
up the theology of the past and took out much
superstition and filled the vacancy with
reason ; he plucked out sectarianism and
inserted brotherhood ; he extracted a large
part of hell and filled the vacancy with
heaven. If some errors of judgment lie
scattered over this long life they do not ruin
the landscape any more than the personal
errors of General Grant ruined his campaign
for the salvation of our country. A great
river always carries some driftwood upon its
bosom. If Mr. Beecher, in his ardour of logic
and battle, sometimes went beyond the true
boundary of doctrinal reform, it matters little,
for the new pulpit learned from its founder
the independence of thought which can
reject as readily as accept. If this Brooklyn
pulpit pencilled some new outlines of religion
and of its sermon and drew them grandly,
the pulpit of to-day must not ask him for all

136

Henry Ward Beecher

the details to be put into the new discourse.
If he helped make for us a country reaching
in beauty from one sea to another, we should
not ask him to plough over fields for us and
tell us what grains and flowers to plant.
If heaven sends an architect great enough in
brain to throw a dome over the vast room
of St. Peter's, other workmen should be glad
to gird themselves for the task of putting
down some marble floors, under the dome and
for the task of fastening some marble saints
to the walls.

But to recall to-day the many sides of this
personal force and beauty would consume
many an hour. His death does not sadden
us by only its own single, dark shadow, but
also by its reminder that a great troop of these
mighty ones is marching down into death's
valley. Mr. Beecher's death seems the death
of a generation. The Parkers, the Phillipses,
the Sumners, the Chases, the Lincolns, the
Grants — freedom's thinkers, freedom's or-
ators, freedom's poets, freedom's statesmen,
freedom's soldiers — are hurrying away from
our world, and are leaving to new hands
interests the greatest ever committed to
mind and heart. There must be a great
Fatherland to which these citizens repair
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The Message of David Swing

because they have accomplished their tasks
in the world. We can survive their loss if
the new multitude will read their lives, mark
their motives of action, their high politics,
their simple but divine religion, and if their
tombs shall become places where youth shall
bow in tears and deep thoughtfulness, and as
at the altars of God make solemn vows of
lifelong service to mankind.

138

YII
PHILLIPS BROOKS1

IT would be an act of ingratitude were
this country to pass in silence the death of
Phillips Brooks. All our churches lay within
borders of his bishopric. When, two or
three years ago, in a loftiness of body which
was only an emblem of a loftiness of mind,
this preacher walked down this aisle to join
you in worship, you all felt as though he
were an elder brother in your religious
family, and had come to visit his kin. Many
of you, when spending a Sunday in the city
where this modern apostle spoke, went joy-
fully to hear words which you knew would
fall like manna from the sky. At last each
of you seemed to hold some personal interest
in Phillips Brooks ; and now to-day we must
all come up to his memory bringing our
tears. Chosen Bishop of Massachusetts in
1891, the new title could not make much
headway against the name of Phillips. In

1 Died January 23, 1893.
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The Message of David Swing

instances not a few, when the title of
" Bishop " is conferred upon a preacher, it
does not take the previous name of the man
more than a few minutes to get out of the
way. If large bodies move slowly, the con-
verse ought to be true and tell us why, often,
when a common preacher is made Bishop,
his name as a human being instantly dis-
appears. In the case of this great friend
who has bidden us " good-bye," the human
being could not be easily displaced by any
office in the gift of the church. As the
names of Edmund Burke and William Pitt
and Daniel Webster never needed any decora-
tion from the catalogue of epithets, thus the
name of Phillips Brooks did not take kindly
to any form of prefix or supplement. If the
peculiar duties of the office could have gone
without carrying a title with them, the scene
would have been happier ; but to attempt to
confer upon Phillips Brooks a title was too
much like painting the pyramids.

William Pitt was called the " Great Com-
moner," not only because he was a member
of the " House," but because he was by
nature a dealer in the most universal of ideas
— those ideas which were good not only for
royal families but for all mankind. When
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Phillips Brooks

the Colonies attempted to secure their right
from the Crown, Mr. Pitt gave his elo-
quence to the cause of the Colonies, because
his mind could see the human race more
easily than it could see the little group of
grandees with the King at their head. Into
the mind of Pitt all the human rights which
had been detected and expressed between the
Greek period and the time of the Earl of
Chatham crowded to be reloved and re-
spoken. As science deals in the universal
truth about trees or stones or stars, so
William Pitt dealt in the propositions which
held true in all lands.

In the vast empire of religions Phil-
lips Brooks was the "Great Commoner."
Whether his mind passed through the pages
of the Gospel, or read as best it could the
history of the primitive church, or read the
confessions of Augustine and saw him pick
up a psalter or heard him pray for the dead,
or if he read all over the dogmas and prac-
tices of the Roman Catholic fathers, he al-
ways emerged from the study infatuated
with only those truths and customs which
seemed most needful to the character and
salvation of the human multitude. He never
possessed the power to turn a little incident
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The Message of David Swing

into a great doctrine. He could not by any
means mistake a piece of the cross for a
potency which could heal disease ; nor was he
able to look upon a lighted candle as playing
any part in any form of natural or revealed
religion. He stood at that point where all
the Christian sects meet. No preacher could
go to Christ without seeing this brother as
being in the same path. All denominations
walked with him and enjoyed a conversation
which made their hearts burn on the way.
He was like that lofty arch in Paris towards
which all the great streets seem to run.
When we think of the discords which are
now sounding all through the field of both
the Catholic and Protestant denominations,
we must recall Phillips Brooks as the recon-
ciliation of the Nineteenth Century.

But no one who loves war can fill the
office of such a "great commoner." That
fame must rest on an intellect which is
wreathed with the garlands of peace. This
man did not fight the Kitualists or the
Romanists ; he came forward with the large
and positive truths of religion and permitted
all that was false or little to die of neglect.
His pulpit was so full of light that his people
forgot to bring candles to the chancel ; the
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Phillips Brooks

fragrance of the Gospel was so exceeding
sweet that no acolytes were needed to swing
smoking censers in front of the holy altar.
We, too, have sat before him when the light
was all in his forehead and the incense all in
his heart.

In the late generations the Episcopal
Church has been producing some great men.
When the clergy of that denomination in
England had become remarkable for the ab-
sence of learning and piety, and remarkable
for the presence of ignorance, indolence and
vice ; when few who wore the name of clergy-
man possessed education enough to compose
a sermon, and had not piety enough to care
for the parish whose taxes they consumed,
the Wesleyan reform sprang up. That effort
was wholly a contempt for a dead sanctuary
and an ardent longing for a religion like that
of the Saviour of men. It was a new effort
to rescue the tomb of Christ from the hand
of the new infidels.

Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne had
divided their time between the writings for
the pulpit and writings for the promotion of
depravity. Sterne published a few sermons,
but his literary books were so disreputable
that the sermons were soon forgotten in the
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The Message of David Swing

pleasure which the vulgarity of " Tristram
Shandy " gave to that age. It was the prev-
alence of such churchmen that compelled
Wesley to rise up in behalf of a Christian life
that bade fair to be forgotten. Wesleyism
did not contemplate a new church ; it was
an uprising against ecclesiastical infamy.
Awakened by Wesleyism, the National Epis-
copacy underwent a great reform and ran
boldly forward.

A pulpit paid by national taxes easily falls
from virtue, and, as often there were paro-
chial schools where the teacher regularly
drew a salary from the state but had an
empty schoolhouse, so there were pulpits
which gave ^a living to some man in holy
orders, who seldom read a service and still
less frequently wearied himself or an audi-
ence with a discourse. It is now about fifty
years since there came to the English Epis-
copal Church a second great impulse. It
was not wholly a reform, but it poured into
that old sanctuary so much new piety and
enthusiasm that it cannot but be called a
marked part of a forward movement. It
passes now in history under any one of
several names : the " tractarian movement,"
or the " high-church movement," or the
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Phillips Brooks

" ritualistic movement," or " Puseyism." A
few minds, deeply religious, — men who in the
Seventeenth Century would have been the
companions of Fenelon — began to study the
far-off church of the fathers. They longed
to rebuild their plundered and razed Jeru-
salem. In the long reign of vice and neglect
even the beautiful buildings of God had
become battered ruins. The house was as
fallen as the heart.

These men, sons of Oxford, went back in
history to find that day of splendour at
which the worship of God began to sink.
They shovelled away the earth from their
buried Pompeii and soon found the rich old
colours upon the long-hidden walls. It was
a most valuable labour of history and love,
for out of it came the rebuilding and repair-
ing of the churches and chapels of England ;
and came also a living religion which joined
a pure belief to a holy life. Hundreds of
millions of dollars soon went into the re-
building of the houses of religion ; but there
is no money which can express the new
Christianity which began at once to re-adorn
the soul.

The men who came back from that his-
* tone study, and who joined in this pious
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The Message of David Swing

renaissance, soon divided into two classes,
the High church and Low church, the former
comprising those men who brought back all
the rites and emblazonry of the earlier times,
while the Low church became eclectic, and,
feeling that the present had outgrown the
emblematic period, asked England to accept
the simple religion of Jesus and His apostles.
The High church became enamoured of all
they discovered and made valuable old atti-
tudes, old positions, a facing the east, showy
vestments, priestly offices, candles, incense,
confessional, and many a genuflection.

These were the Eitualists, with whom the
sandal of a Christ was the essential part of
the Saviour of mankind. The Low church
became equally enamoured only of that part
of the New Testament which they found in
the old lava beds, and, making of little moment
the robes and motions and incense of the re-
mote yesterday, they espoused a Christianity
which reached out a kind hand towards the
sects which had filed down from Calvin and
Wesley. The High church used its relics for
building a wall around itself. And thus it
stands to-day, walled in, and as exclusive as
though it feared that its friendship might
escape and be wasted upon a Presbyterian
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Phillips Brooks

or a Wesleyan, and as though the love of
God might escape and invade some meeting-
house which did not make the sign of the
cross, or might escape and save some infant
that was dying at midnight without being
baptized.

It cannot in reason be charged upon the
Ritualists that they make religion too ornate.
Man has not lived in this world long enough
to enable him to say that any part of life can
hold too much of real beauty. The temperate
zone from the Gulf to the St. Lawrence is
beautiful in June, but it has never dared
laugh at the more abundant blossomings of
the tropics. Many of us have had happy
moments in those sanctuaries where grand
choral music has marched up and down and
in and out.

There may be other minds which love to
face the east, and other minds which love to
see incense rising as though it were carrying
heavenward the burden of human prayers.
Persons of little or much culture must be
eclectics in the realm of beauty for the
church, or the city, or the home. If the
ritualists feel proud of a pictured religion,
and ask that many texts of Scripture be ut-
tered in material emblems, and that the
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The Message of David Swing

candles of Solomon's Temple reappear in
the modern house of God, they have a taste
we are all bound to respect. We concede
the same right to those Christians who love
the rite of washing each other's feet. We
confess sympathy with the ritualism of the
Salvation Army, which pictures Christ as
the Captain of their host and which follows
Paul in the dream of being a good soldier of
the Lord. Let ritualism appear where it
may, in the High church, or the Koman
church, or in the Salvation Army, it must
pass along as a lawful form and variation of
human taste. Its harmfulness has of late
years come from minds, which, instead of
admiring and enjoying Ritualism, have de-
scended to the worship of it — the worship of
such fugitive and unimportant accessories —
which made it difficult for a Bishop's crown
to reach a forehead which loved the sublime
spirituality of Jesus more than it loved the
fleeting pageantry of perfumes and colours,
and which loved the face turned towards
all the sects in their hour of prayer more
than he loved a genuflection or a face turned
towards the east.

In the east we see only the sun, but all
around this man lay the hopes and griefs of
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Phillips Brooks

the human soul, more tremendous than a
thousand suns. If any proof were wanting,
to show that Ritualism, when idolized, turns
men who might have been scholars and
thinkers and orators into half-childish
natures, busy in the ornaments of an altar,
like children around the Christmas tree, that
proof may be read in the difficulties which
lay between Phillips Brooks and the high
office for which he seemed to have been
born. In itself, Ritualism may be a lawful
form of religion, but history shows that it
may be cultivated until it excludes what it
once ornamented, and ends by becoming
only the tropical efflorescence of human
vanity. A deep attachment to Ritualism
may be taken as a good-bye bidden by the
young preacher to the height and depth of
thought which belongs to the pulpit in all
the great period of church life. A high
Kitualism is a most perfect and most alluring
means for keeping the mind of the clergyman
within the limits of a perpetual childhood.
A Ritualist ought to admire his ceremony as
a man loves flowers — happy when the blos-
soms are near, but happy also in the barren
fields of winter or in Sahara's leafless sand.
If one thinks of the High churchmen and
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The Message of David Swing

the Low churchmen as visiting the old past
to find once again the lost church of the
fathers, one must see the Ritualist entering
our age, not only bringing much of the
apostolic doctrine, but also as having his
arms full of candles, of priestly robes, of
curtains fastened by " loops of blue each to
its sister," and full of " badger-skins dyed
red"; and the same spectator must see the
Low churchman coming from that act of ex-
huming, carrying in his hands the words and
deeds and life of our Lord. You may all, if
you wish, admire many a High churchman
acting in his peculiar office, but for this
absent Bishop you cannot but cherish a
greater admiration and a deeper love. He
reached out his hand to all men, and so sin-
cere was he that his hand always pointed out
the path of his heart.

"When the heart studies the bygone years,
it ought to esteem great in the past that
which it wishes to come true in the future.
"We ought to look deeply at the yesterdays
in order to catch the image of to-morrow.
And, as the soul of Phillips Brooks longed to
see a Christian unity and equality, longed to
see a civilization which should resemble the
life of the Son of Man, he gathered up from
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Phillips Brooks

the fathers the doctrines which tended to
make noble men and to join them into a
wide brotherhood. The Ritualists seem, by
some error of locality, to have exhumed the
Mosaic age ; the Low churchmen seem to
have laid open to view a more recent arena
— that of Jesus.

In his wanderings in the old religious
world, this lamented mortal recalls that
Dante who, in his great dream, drew near a
holy mountain, which lifted up its form not
far from the Paradise of his God. The
devout wanderer did not see any candles or
vestments or studied posturing ; he saw no
"apostolic succession." The world around
him was too great to be in harmony with the
rites and emblems of some fleeting year.
One by one the angels came over him, but
each one was chanting some benediction
which had once fallen from the lips of the
Master. No sooner had the words sounded,
"Blessed are the pure in heart," than on
came some other winged choristers saying,
"Blessed are the merciful." To the same
Italian worshipper at last a great chorus
chanted the Lord's Prayer, all amplified like
a tune in music which breaks up into four
parts;

The Message of David Swing

" Oh, Thou Almighty Father ! Who dosfc make
The heavens Thy dwelling, not in bounds confined,
But that with love iutenser there Thou viewest
Thy primal effluence, hallowed be Thy name !
Join each created being to extol
Thy might, for worthy humblest thanks and praise
Is Thy blessed Spirit. May the Kingdom's peace
Come unto us, for we, unless it- come,
With all our striving thither tend in vain."

These are the words which our great
American " Commoner " heard chanted in
the lofty cathedrals of the past, and these
are the words he wished to hear sounding in
the greater aisles and corridors of the future.
He extracted greatness from the past because
he wished history to be only another name
for his soul's hope. His mind conceived of a
service and an anthem too great to be read
or sung by his limited sect. His ritual must
include a hundred Books of Common Prayer ;
his vestments must include the robes of a
Louis XIY, the habit of an exiled Quaker,
and the seamless coat of Jesus. He found
his universal and perpetual harmony in the
words : " Blessed are the pure in heart."

If you would find a reason for the con-
fessed eloquence of this eminent Christian,
you must begin by studying the advantage
found in a mind which loved the whole hu-
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Phillips Brooks

man family, and then loved all the great
truths which hold the people's happiness.
Eloquence is the utterance of great truths in
a manner worthy of the truths. But there
can be no such utterance without passion.
This man was capable of loving even the
negro slave. When those old days of trial
were brooding over the Nation, Phillips
Brooks flamed up on the slaves' side. After
the slaves were free he travelled a thousand
miles to plead in this city for the cause of
the education and full citizenship of those
homeless Africans. Only a little group of
our citizens appeared in the large hall, for
the orator was young in his fame and the
city was young in its power to appreciate
such an appeal from heart to heart. None
the less did the speech run like molten iron
from a furnace, thus teaching us who listened
that oratory is great truth uttered with great
passion. Gesture and tone are insignificant.
It is necessary for this truth and passion
to enjoy the noble accessories of language
and style. It is difficult for a great mind,
great heart, great language, and good style,
all to meet in one human being. The dis-
tance between orators is therefore very great.
Only a few come to us each hundred years.
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The Message of David Swing

In Bishop Brooks, all these ingredients
mingled. He had by nature and by study
mastered the one language of his race. It
became at last the hundred gates of his soul's
Thebes. At these portals the riches of his
age passed in and out. He used no dead
words, no old, worn-out phrases, at which
the brain of the listener sinks to sleep. His
words were all alive, and they came singing
like the string and arrows of the wonderful
bow of Ulysses. His words came too rapidly
indeed, but his ideas were instantly seen and
instantly felt to be true. Each word was
distinct, like a single note in some rapid
melody, an inseparable part of a beautiful
song.

What a simplicity there is in all such high
speech ! because the theme is so large and so
absorbing that it shames away the most of
artifice, and makes the little art of the piece
wholly invisible. If those final words as-
cribed to the Bishop were indeed spoken, his
mind was not greatly under a cloud, for the
simple sentence whispered to a servant :
" You need not care for me longer ; I am go-
ing home," is made of the kind of words
which earth needs when it is fading, and
which the final home asks for when it is
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Phillips Brooks

opening its gates to a noble spirit, once a
pilgrim here. Death always asks for simple
language, because its mystery and sadness
and hope are all the ornamentation the
speaker or listener can bear. Ah ! sad loss
such a being to all the churches of our coun-
try ! He was a man so symmetrical and so
fitted to all the hours and need of our land
that the office of bishop went to him, not to
add anything to his fame or power, but to
be itself honoured and exalted. It was the
office that went to be crowned. As an Epis-
copal bishop he was much less than as the
great, free orator of the Christian philosophy.
But the terms " bishop " and " commoner "
are both made sacred now by the sudden ad-
vent of death.

It is certain that this name will long re-
main the centre of a magic power. The
Baptist, with his close communion, cannot
but be impressed with that scene of brother-
hood which lies so outspread in this church-
man's life ; the Unitarians can also look
towards Phillips Brooks, to know how
rationalism of a high school may be joined
to the most marked spirituality and piety ;
the restless and debating Presbyterians may
study him, to learn what peace and useful-
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The Message of David Swing

ness they can find in a Christianity many
times simpler than their Confession of Faith ;
to him may the Low church look for per-
petual vindication ; and to him should all the
young ritualistic clergy turn, not to abandon
their pictured and highly coloured worships,
but to mark how the pulpit of a Christian
teacher and thinker towers above the swing-
ing of censers and the adjustment of robes
and the graceful bowing of the body in its
acts of devotion. He should warn them
against the folly of a half -wasted life.

While we are thus standing by such a
grave, the inquiry comes from many whether
Kitualism and Komanism are to displace the
simpler churches and come into almost
despotic power. Of this result there seems
little probability. The Broad church is
young, but Kitualism is as old as the world.
It ruled in the Mosaic age. It ruled in
India, Egypt, and in all great nations before
the Son of Man came, and then entering
Christianity it filled with its pageant all
temples up to the days of Luther.

The Broad church has been in the world
only half a century. In that brief period
what master minds it has produced ! It is
nothing else than the old Christianity of

Phillips Brooks

«•:, -i

rites and doctrines smitten by the deeper
thought of these later generations. That
reason which has created the modern world
will most surely drive religion towards a
holy life, a simple piety and a wide brother-
hood. Romanism will be smitten by the
same hand, and one by one shall fall from it
the follies and vices which that Church
gathered up by passing through the middle
centuries of ignorance and sin. That new
thought, which has transformed despotisms
into republics and slaves into the citizens of
England and France, will not spare the old
life and ideas of the temple of prayer. The
antiquity of Bornanism and Kitualism will
not protect them. Many things thousands
of years old have died in this century. It is
the great graveyard of antiquity and the
beautifully draped cradle of a new youth.

When it is said that reason will smite the
old churches, it is not meant that any violence
will come. Heaven keep violence far away
from all those Roman and Protestant altars
where our parents said their prayers ! Reason
will smite them only as it smote the valley
of the Mississippi and covered it with civi-
lization ; smite them only as the sun smites
the fields in April and makes them bloom ;
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The Message of David Swing"

smite them as reason touched Phillips Brooks
when he was young and made his heart
warm with love and his forehead white with
pure truth.

YIII
DECOEATION DAY

TO-MOEEOW the graves of the soldiers
are to be decorated by the hands of
memory and esteem. Many thousand per-
sons will pay thus the tribute of personal
love. Many a mother will visit the spot
where her son sleeps; many a man and a
woman, now in middle life, will visit the
grave where their father rests. He marched
to war when they were little children. They
remember some noise of drums and some sad
parting ; they remember the body came back
and that the neighbours met to hold a funeral
service. To-morrow old letters will be re-
read and old photographs restudied with
many a tear.

A few days before the battle of Stone
Eiver a young husband, a colonel of cavalry,
left Cincinnati in haste, to resume his place
with his troopers. He foresaw a great battle.
He wrote a good-bye note to his wife, saying
that ' a great battle was near ; he might fall ;
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The Message of David Swing

she must not wear mourning ; she must plant
some vines by his grave, and go on as though
in the world of a great and kind God.' In
a few days that awful meeting of armies
came, and this colonel was among the slain.
Thus tens of thousands of graves will to-
morrow be visited by hearts full of an affec-
tion which no years can abate. Many will
say : Here my father sleeps ; here my brother,
here my cousin, here my classmate, turns to
dust. But as that generation of weepers
will soon all be silent as the soldiers, will
soon overtake them in the great halting-
place, this Decoration Day will soon rest upon
the gratitude which a Nation owes to its de-
fenders and upon the admiration all noble
minds cherish for men who were heroic
enough to imperil their life for their country.
Each soldier's monument in the cities and
cemeteries of the land will be decorated to-
morrow ; not in the name of personal friend-
ship only, but also in the name of that intel-
ligence and self-denial which could fight and
die for the welfare of society. Even when
the public shall not know even the names of
the entombed soldiers it will cast down its
offerings to their virtues.
It adds much to the beauty of to-morrow
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Decoration Day

that all the wars of our Nation have been
honourable. Exception must be made in the
case of the war with Mexico in 1846. That
conflict with a neighbour was brought about
by the Southern clamour for more slave
territory. Texas must be annexed with or
without the consent of Mexico. The Union
would at once be dissolved unless the South
were granted this new era. With a view to
such annexation, Mr. Polk, of Tennessee, was
elected President and soon came annexation
and war. The other struggles — that of
1776, of 1812 and of 1861— were founded
upon great principles of right, and they
stand in history all ennobled by the calmest
thought, truth and honour. Out of these
three struggles our Nation extracted those
principles and that power which make it at
last such a home for so many millions.
Whoever will to-day make a survey of this
Nation and mark the blessings and oppor-
tunities it confers upon its citizens will not
fail to whisper his gratitude to all those men
who gave up their lives in those fields of
battle.

Those dark days which came between
1860 and 1865 were gloomy beyond the
realization of any of those who were then
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The Message of David Swing

children. The loyal States were full of all
the sorrows which wars entail. Values were
all unsettled, literature, education, and all
art had come to a halt. The heart was full
of depression lest England might join in the
Confederacy.

Defeats, carnage, blunders, great expense,
new calls for troops, mourning in all cities
and villages found a procession of ideas as
gloomy as the ideal march of death. Thou-
sands of the noblest men in the North were
so depressed by the awful surroundings that
they said to each other in private : " Perhaps
it would have been better to let the slave
States withdraw in peace." The outcome of
war was as much hidden in 1862 as it was in
1776. However patriotic and brave a man
may be, his heart can easily become the
victim of doubts. It is easy now for our
young generation to look back upon the last
war and see it as only a long march of an
invincible army. An army led by men who
did not know defeat and who had little to
do except shout victory behind a running
enemy. So Franklin in later life could look
back with pleasure to the time when he was
poor and homeless, but it was not in his
power when he had only the loaf of bread to
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Decoration Day

look forward with much of romantic poetry.
Thus our new millions can look back upon
the war of the Union and see a fine procession
of statesmen marching towards universal
liberty, but those who marched and those
who led thirty years ago could not gaze upon
any such a scene, there being a thick, black
curtain between them and the future.

There was in the North and in Canada a
party formed in the name of a disgraceful
peace. They talked of conventions of the
Middle States ; talked of a new separate West,
and never used any language about the
Union except that of despair. These men
once sent word from Canada to Mr. Lincoln
that they were empowered to negotiate a
peace. Patriots feared that there would be a
guerilla conflict for twenty years. The sud-
denness with which the war at last ended, the
sudden acceptance of the defeat by the entire
South came to the whole world as a great
surprise. The soldiers whose names we are
to honour not only fought for their country,
but they fought, suffered, and died amid
great gloom. They could not see a final
perfect triumph — they could only toil and
hope. To suffer, to be wounded, to die on
the eve of an assured victory might be a

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The Message of David Swing

form of blessedness ; but heavy were the
hearts which had to endure agony without
being able to read the future of the contest.

A Greek orator who had to speak at Athens
after a very disastrous battle said that the
true soldier never dies defeated, for, go as
the battle may, there is victory always in his
soul. It must have been thus with the de-
fenders of our Union. They must have been
so full of the sense of right and duty that in
prison or in the hospital or dying on the field,
their minds must have been filled with
triumph. In one of the darkest hours of
the whole strife those disunionists who had
assembled in Canada asked permission to
come to Washington and submit to the
President some terms of peace. Mr. Lincoln
sent word that he would give them an audi-
ence only in case their plans involved the
restoration of the Union and the abolition of
slavery ; there could be no peace on any other
terms. Thus with Mr. Lincoln, however
dark the battle-field, there was always a
victory in his heart.

It must have been thus with the rank and

file in their last hour. Sinking away upon

the bloody field, while their eyes were taking

a last look at the picture of wife and child

164

Decoration Day

or father or mother, those noble men must
have felt within the triumph of the most
divine right. The cause was one of the
greatest for which arms ever clashed.

The Greeks and Komans often made war
only through vanity, or else that they might
plunder a rich neighbour. Napoleon marched
600,000 men against Moscow only because
the Czar of Russia would not close the Russian
harbour to English ships. Here in America
the contest was for the preservation of the
best nation ever founded in the whole history
of man, a nation whose principles had been
selected from the wisdom of all ages and
which had been made into a State by the
wisest and best of all men, principles which
for nearly a hundred years had brought to
millions of citizens the most possible of pros-
perity and happiness.

But this Nation so famous for its men and
ideas contained one dark spot. It contained
a blemish which France, Germany, England
and Russia would not permit to soil their fame.
At last the hour came in which the question
must be settled whether the blemish must be
continued and the Nation destroyed, or
whether the Nation should be preserved and
the spot erased. Thus came a war not of
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The Message of David Swing

vanity or conquest, but a struggle to save
the wisdom of ages. By a singular mental
misfortune there was a group of Confederate
citizens who loved slavery more than they
loved freedom ; they had reached the singular
wisdom which could love the spots on the sun
more than they loved the sun, loved the
worm in a rose more than they loved the
rose itself.

When it is remembered that under the war
lay such a noble groundwork of right and
truth it ought not to be difficult for us to
feel that our Nation's dead died in peace,
even on the fields of defeat ; it ought not to
be difficult for us to cast flowers upon their
tombs. We ought to feel that no soul can be
prolific enough in blossoms to equal the moral
excellence of the day.

All the happiness, all the success, all the
splendour of the present combine to enhance
the honour of the soldier's grave. The mind
can easily make here and now a picture of
certain beautiful forms going forth to-mor-
row to honour the patriotic dead. The form
of Keligion happy in her new truth and new
morality ; the form of Politics, set free from
an old wrong ; Education widened and en-
riched ; Art quickened and exalted ; Litera-
166

Decoration Day

ture newly inspired ; the South awakened to
personal industry and full of new dreams;
the South and North holding hands in friend-
ship : — these graceful figures can be seen as
hovering like blest angels over the soldiers'
dust and saying in simple gratitude, " Soldier
of the Nation, we thank thee with full
heart."

All the prosperous cities and towns which
are now redeeming the South, the growing
unity of language, literature, social life and
political doctrine and sentiment, come to us
from those battle-fields whose memory re-
turns in each May. It would have been
more in harmony with all religion and all
philosophy could the establishment of the
Union and the abolition of slavery have
come by peaceful ways and means, but since
this was impossible, unable now to amend
the past, we must go back to all those bloody
grounds and bless them that, out of such suf-
ferings, they grew for an age so many
flowers. In the name of a noble Nation, all
united from Gulf to Lake and from sea to sea,
in the name of the advance of all that is
good, in the name of inventions, discoveries,
sciences, arts, a happier womanhood, a hap-
pier childhood, a nobler manhood, we this
167

The Message of David Swing

day declare fragrant and precious all those
flowers which send their roots down into our
soldiers' dust. The events which have fol-
lowed the dreadful war have justified its
years of deep sorrow. The bitterness has
all passed, the days of peace have come.

ISTo one who attempts to-day to speak in
the name of both religion and the soldier
will dare pass by the fact that the African,
although free from the chains of a slave, is
still the victim of a wide-spread injustice.
He is still too often treated as an animal not
worthy of human rights. Against the con-
tinuance of the old slave-driving theory, all
honourable men, white and black, must
think and act ; but at the same time our col-
oured citizens must give the South credit for
having made a very great progress in its
opinions and conduct. A new era is coming,
but all men must lament that it comes in
slowly.

Our public men are simply the creatures
of the age. Our Presidents move very
slowly for fear they may walk away from
that ballot-box which is to contain the war-
rant of a second term. Our only hope lies
in such an awakening of the people as shall
at last make justice to the African citizen a
1 68

Decoration Day

matter of life and death to the men who
want high office. We must make opinions
for years and years before we can make
great statesmen.

The "second term" must be abolished,
and then must come one more reform, that
of making to a common, scheming, soulless
politician even a first term, impossible. A
President of such a Nation ought not to be a
tame follower of old, beaten political paths.
He ought to be a humane man, a lover of
even the poor ; capable like Christ of bless-
ing the multitude with new beatitudes
straight from heaven. Since Mr. Lincoln
there has been no president who revealed
any marked humane sentiments. Exception
may well be made in the person of President
Hayes. He did what he could for the free-
dom of the South. He would have done
more had not his term been full of the
troubles which were yet strong and fresh
from the war of the rebellion. But with
Mr. Hayes humanity disappeared. However
great in many particulars the Presidents may
have been, no one of them has been visibly
affected by the fact that the negro in the
South cannot vote in safety and is liable any
day to be imprisoned, whipped, hanged, or
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The Message of David Swing

burned. Had Henry Bergh been President
in any one of the late Presidential periods,
he would have found some means of check-
ing that cruelty which so shames our civili-
zation. But literature, the daily press, the
pulpit, all good men and women, North and
South, will have to be active some years yet
before a refined civilization, one of love and
justice, will be able to trample to dust that
stereotyped soul, the calculating political
character, which is so utterly and forever
heartless.

The same slow progress which gave the
African liberty must go onward and clothe
him with every form of human right. The
soldiers whose graves are so sacred must be
ornamented not only by floral offerings but
also by the ever-growing happiness of the
whole people. Our troops did not fight and
die for these May lilies, roses and laurels,
but they did for humanity, and their most
worthy Decoration Day will come in only
that spring which shall say to their disem-
bodied souls : " Every human being in the
Union is living in the fullness of confessed
and secured right."

Towards such a noble result we must all
struggle with daily industry and with daily
170

Decoration Day

hope. As the churches are now attempting
to get Calvinism out of their creeds, and are
no longer willing to disgrace the Deity by
making Him select a few men for happiness
and doom others to wrath, so must we elimi-
nate such a philosophy from the Nation and
save it from the disgrace of electing white
men to mercy and dooming black men to the
jail and rope and malicious fire. Let not
those at least rail at Calvinism who conduct
a Nation in the name of a most infamous
reprobation.

The right has this fact to encourage it —
that the American public has always sooner
or later made its moral force felt in law and
conduct. Its words of truth and pleadings
have never been lost. The daily press, the
magazines and reviews, the graver literature,
the schoolhouse, the pulpit, have always
compelled the darkness to flee and light to
come. These voices can once more penetrate
the clouds and usher in a happier day to
souls that have been wronged for three hun-
dred years. If not many years ago there
was a vast multitude of persons who died on
bloody fields for human rights and happiness,
is there not now living a still more numerous
army who will live in flowery states, in a
171 •

The Message of David Swing

blossoming world, for an advance of the
same right and happiness? Will you not
all live for principles for which your brothers
died? The South is herself beginning to
speak and act in behalf of the rights of the
African. Such wise words and deeds are
worthy of being reprinted all through the
land and of being expanded into full elo-
quence.

Let us pass from this plea for the African
and take one more view of the soldier's
grave. Each year lessens the discord be-
tween the North and South and increases
the harmony. "What our country now needs
is not a host of recriminating historians, but
a host of brotherly souls bound up in a new
future. Never was adequate justice done the
judgment and feelings of Charles Sumner
when, soon after the close of the rebellion,
he moved in the Senate that " no name of
any battle-field of the war be placed upon
the Nation's flag and that the Capitol should
contain on its walls no picture of a battle in
which citizens fought citizens." The mo-
tion was ridiculed by many Northern Sena-
tors and editors of that day, but the lapse of
years has shown the idea just and beautiful.
No American ever surpassed Charles Sunmer
172

Decoration Day

in the conception and defense of human
rights, but he was incapable of worshipping
war between brothers. He gladly washed
all such battle pictures from his remem-
brance. His spirit ought to become rapidly
the spirit of our Nation in its entire extent.
Hate must be transient, love eternal.

That breadth of mind and soul which made
Charles Sumner so impressive is moving over
the South and is liable to adorn that warm
heart whose love and philosophy were re-
pressed by the presence and use of human
bondage. There remains nothing to prevent
a oneness of idea from prevailing between
Chicago and Memphis and Atlanta.

A Confederate officer in an essay contrib-
uted recently to a literary magazine of Dallas,
Texas, having summed up his sad memories
of the war, adds these words : " Peace and
happiness reign supreme over a free people.
Our hearts are great enough to love our
whole country, North and South, mountain,
river and plain. The gulf breezes waft soft
messages from orange bowers to Northern
hills and apple blossoms. . . . We are all
Americans. We are all patriots. Thus let
it be forever." Thus this brilliant essay of
J. E. Cole reveals the fact that the graves of
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The Message of David Swing

the soldiers imply a national unity of princi-
ples and a wide-spread oneness of heart.
Many years ago the words "impending
crisis " and " irrepressible conflict " were
upon the lips of all statesmen. How could
slavery and liberty dwell in the same house ?
All we need know to-day is that the land is
full of soldiers' graves and those words are
gone. There is no " impending crisis," the
"irrepressible conflict" has passed away.
The blood of our brothers has purchased the
unity and happiness of a great people. One
justice, one truth, one duty, one hope, are
slowly advancing as though like morning
sunbeams they were anxious to flood all
fields with one light.

When to-morrow you shall look at monu-
ments and graves of the known and the
nameless dead, tears ought to fill your eyes
at the thought of the thirty years in which
those hearts have been absent from the
scenery and experience of this life. On
your account they are absent from your
world. But such tears meet the demand
which the soldier's tomb makes upon the
soul of every living citizen. When Pericles
attempted to comfort the Athenians at the
graves of their soldiers he told them that at
174

Decoration Day

best ' earth was the sepulchre of a vast mul-
titude of illustrious men. It was only a large
grave.' But this is the comfort of an iron-
like fate. It is not adequate to our greater
age. We need a richer philosophy. We
must say that through these scattered hill-
ocks, with their May ornaments of grass and
garlands, there comes to us the voice of God
and man, earth and sky saying, Catch from
these braves their spirit ; take up the banners
of truth their dying hands let fall ; as they
made a greater nation, so go ye on to make
the grander Kepublic a greater art, a greater
learning, a greater justice, a greater friend-
ship, a greater religion. The souls of the
soldiers are not in these graves. They are
far away on diviner heights. So those who
to-morrow shall strew lilies must at once
turn away from those heaps of dust and look
up towards nobler heights in religion and in
all the blessed forms of love and righteous-
ness. Such death must be the inspiration of
life.

175

IX
THE DUTY OF THE PULPIT

In the Hour of Social Unrest

IT would be a happiness to all of us, could
we meet to-day having in our hands
branches from the woods or shells from the
shore where we may have recently attempted
to find pleasure and rest : but the events of
the last few months, and the gloom of the
future, have stolen from prairie and seacoast
their long-found charm.

The trees and the waters have for many
weeks past sighed over the infirmities of our
country.

To find the images of greatness, we have
been compelled to look into the past. When
President Cleveland intervened, and, per-
haps, saved this city from being plundered
and burned, some men feared to thank him
for such a quick intervention. July must
deal very gently with criminals who are to
vote in November.

176

The Duty of the Pulpit

Not since 1861 has the sky been as dark
as it is to-day.1 We have unconsciously built
up within this generation two black passions
— the one, the feeling that money is the only
thing worth living for, and the other, that
work must hate capital. Thus the level of
all society is lowered — the moneyed class by
its worship of gold, the other class by its life
of hate. While wealth has inflamed its pos-
sessors and worshippers, there has lived and
talked an army of angry orators, whose pur-
pose has been to make the men who work in
the vineyard hate the men who pay them at
nightfall. In such circumstances, the vine-
yard will soon be, first, a battle-field, and
then, a desert.

It would seem that all the Christian clergy,
Catholic and Protestant, and all the ethical
teachers should, this autumn, enter into a
new friendship with these two discordant
classes, and preach to both alike the gospel
of a high humanity. The churches and
pulpits of all grades possess a vast influence.
They do not hold any " key to the situation,"
or any " balance of power " ; they cannot
open and close the gates of the earthly
heaven and hell for America ; but they

September, 1894.
177

The Message of David Swing

possess an enormous moral force — a power
that should no longer be exhausted upon
little theological issues and practices. All
the intellectual and spiritual resources of the
pulpit should be exhausted in the effort to
advance human character. Society needs
speedy and large additions to both its right-
eousness and its common sense.

What saved the country from a great
calamity last July was the fact that the
schoolhouse, the church, and the press, of
the last fifty years had quietly created an in-
telligence large enough to stand between the
people and their ruin. When the new kind
of autocrat ordered all the railway wheels
between the two oceans to stop, and had
sat down to enjoy the silence of locomotives
and iron rails, there were so many noble and
educated men in the railway service that the
voice of the autocrat was the only noise that
died out. It was not President Cleveland
alone that came between us and a great
calamity. He was aided by the high com-
mon sense of a large majority of the railway
employees. The railway union of working
men was not formed for a career of mingled
cruelty and nonsense, but that men might
help each other in honourable ways and in
178

The Duty of the Pulpit

hours of great wrong and need. The union
was not formed in order that railway men
might become beggars, at a time when
their work was bringing almost a barrel
of flour a day for each family. With wages
at two dollars a day and wheat at half a
dollar a bushel, the strike and trouble of
July were not only unreasonable but ma-
licious.

Nearly all clergymen stand close to the
people. They are reared in the philosophy
that gives bread to the hungry. The gospel
of Christ is one of infinite sympathy. Men
who from choice enter the ministry of the
Judaean religion are never so happy as when
they see the labourer sit down under a good
roof to a table spread with abundant food.
In the life of the average clergyman, a large
part of his thought and public utterance,
and actual labour and sympathy, is given to
what is called the common people. The
upper classes need little. There is nothing
in the millionaire that appeals to the heart.
The rich are so self -adequate that they may
draw admiration and esteem, but not sym-
pathy. The heart of the pulpit is freely
given to the middle and lower classes. In
all time, the common people have attracted
179

The Message of David Swing

to themselves the most of both philosophy
and poetry, but the attention and the affec-
tion they won in the former times seem
weak, compared with the love that has been
flung to them in the passing century. Under
the influence of this sympathetic philosophy,
wages have been advanced, humane laws
have been passed, the facts of health and
disease have been studied, and new action
has come with new light ; and when into
such an age of both inquiry and action there
is projected such a scene as that of last July,
the spectacle does not belong to reason or
humanity, but only to despotic ignorance and
ill will.

Labour may, and even must, organize ; but
the labourers must organize as just and law-
abiding men, country-loving men, and not as
bandits. The depressing memory of last
July is not to be found in the fact that
labour was organized, or wholly in the fact
that it " struck." The strike was, indeed, per-
fectly destitute of common sense, but the
chief disgrace of the hour lay in the willing-
ness of free men to obey a central despot and
join in such acts of wrong and violence as
would have disgraced savages. Benevolence
is humiliated that it must feed and clothe
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The Duty of the Pulpit

men who will break the skull or kick to
insensibility the brother who wishes to earn
bread for his hungry family.

It was discovered last July that some of
thejabour unions employ fighting men to go
to and fro to hunt up and knock down those
who do not join in the folly — those who are
satisfied with their wages or who must work.
Not every workman is a trained pugilist.
So men are hired to spend the day or the
week in pounding men who are noble and
industrious. The cry " I am an American "
does not avail as much in Chicago as the
words " I am a Roman " availed Paul in
Jerusalem. When Paul said he was a Roman,
the mob fell back ; but when Mr. Cleveland
said, " These pounded men are Americans,"
it was thought by some that he was not the
proper person to make the remark. And yet
our pulpits have, for fifty years, been trying
to make Christians, and our schools and
printing-presses have been trying to endow
these Christians with sense.

Quite a number of clergymen have banded
together to preach the gospel of personal
righteousness ; that Christianity is Christ in
human life, Christ in society, Christ in money,
and Christ in work. We preachers must all
181

The Message of David Swing

come to that definition of the church. This
height of thought will make all dizzy for a
time ; but the quality of our old Christianity
will not meet the demands of a republic. A
despotism may be sustained by Catholics or
Protestants, but a republic must be sustained
by men.

Labour guilds are as old as work and
capital ; but one kind of labour guild is new,
and let us all pray that it shall not live to
become old. In the darkness of the Four-
teenth Century, the young working man
looked happily forward to the day when
he could be admitted into the guild of his
craft. His mother and sisters looked after
his habits, that his character might be above
reproach. The approach to the initiation
day was much like a youth's approach to his
first communion. ISTew clothes, a feast, new
conduct, new inspiration, new hopes came
with the hour that placed this new name
upon the noble roll. But this was in the
dark ages. In the close of the Nineteenth
Century, when the heavens and earth are
ablaze with the light of Christ, when love
for man is written everywhere in letters of
gold, when congresses of religion meet to
teach us that all men are brethren, then the
182

The Duty of the Pulpit

men who join a guild shake a bludgeon at
their brother and are advised by a reckless
king to buy a gun. Some men call this
phenomenon a commercial disturbance. It
is nothing of the kind. In the South Sea
Islands it is barbarism ; among the carnivo-
rous animals it is called ferocity; in our
civilized land it is infamy.

It seems evident that Christianity asks
labourers to be organized into societies. If
a church may be organized that Christians
may help each other and confer with each
other about all things that pertain to the
church, why may not carpenters and railway
men form a union that many minds and
many hearts may find what is best for the
toilers in their field ? The word " Church "
means a gathering of people, and if the
exigencies of religion may demand an as-
sembly, so may the exigencies of a trade.
But none of these assemblages can sustain
any relations whatever to violence or any
kind of interference with the liberty or
rights of man. For a vast group of railway
men to sign away their personal liberty and
permit some one man to order them around
as though slaves, is a spectacle pitiful to look
upon ; but to band together for interference
183

The Message of David Swing

with the rights of man is, not a mental
weakness, but a crime.

It is a great task for a labour guild to
study and fully learn what are the facts and
the needs of itself. Before men quit their
employers, they should all know the reason
of the move. After men have been idle for
a winter and have come to regular work and
regular pay, if they hasten to strike, their
reason ought to be so large that the whole
world can see it. But we do things differ-
ently in enlightened America. Our men
hasten to throw down tools and their wages,
and, at last, when starving, they ask some
committee to make a microscopical search for
the reason of the distress. And, before this
reason is known, eminent men express them-
selves as in full sympathy with it. All the
railway wheels in America were ordered to
stop out of sympathy with a reason which a
committee was looking for with a micro-
scope. The railways were giving work to
four millions of people. This work was all
" called off " by a man with some telegraphic
blanks, and the poor families supported by
the Northwestern Railroad lost two hundred
thousand dollars, the workmen of the Illinois
Central one hundred and sixty-four thousand
184

The Duty of the Pulpit

dollars, of the Milwaukee and St. Paul one
hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars,
and thus on to the millions — all which loss
was ordered from sympathy with men who
were getting each six hundred dollars a year.

Labour unions will waste their work by the
millions of dollars' worth, and will soil their
name and ruin the sympathy of literature,
art and religion, as long as they trust their
cause to hot-headed, ignorant, illogical men.
Labour should have for its chieftains our
Franklins or our John Stuart Mills. These
should be its guide. If our land possesses no
such minds, then are we on the eve of untold
misfortune. When labour shall have Frank-
lins for its walking delegates, it will enter
upon a new career. Capital will confer with
it, congresses of working men will meet, and
men will find the wages of each toiler and of
each new period ; but nothing can be done
by a foolish despot with a club. Yes, some-
thing can be done — the Republic can be
hopelessly ruined through a ruined manhood.

The wages and whole welfare of the
labouring man have been much advanced in
twenty-five years, but the gun and club have
taken no part in this progress. Conference,
thought, reason, benevolence, have accom-
185

The Message of David Swing

plished the blessed task, and they will do much
more when they are invited to help our race.
Moral power makes laws. It ' shames the
guilty. It dissolves adamant. It founded the
Christian Church. It has civilized whole
races ; it has emancipated the mind ; it has
freed slaves.

It may easily be remembered that a London
man a few years ago unveiled the wrongs
inflicted upon poor young girls. This in-
justice did not need to be examined by a
microscope. The heart of London became
aflame with indignation. The Archbishop
of Canterbury, and the Archbishop of West-
minster, Cardinal Manning, the Bishop of
London, Sir William Harcourt, and Sir
Robert Cross, flung their minds and hearts
into the cause, and the Parliament passed a
new law for a longer and diviner protection
of girls.

To many labour unions all talk of moral
power carries the weight of only nonsense.
The moral influence theory is indeed defect-
ive, but it is the only one within human
reach. If a dozen men should resolve that
they have rights to seats in a street car, their
theory seems good ; but, on getting into one
of these vehicles, if they find the seats all
1 86

The Duty of the Pulpit

taken, unless they can club those persons
out of those seats, the theory of those dozen
unionists is very defective. When a man re-
solves that he ought to sit down and then
stands up, his resolution is defective. But
what makes it defective ? The rights of the
man who is sitting down. So when a set of
men resolve that they will work only for
four dollars a day, they hold an imperfect
platform, because of the rights of the men
who will work for three dollars. Should a
clergyman resign his pulpit because his people
will not pay him six thousand dollars a year,
his theory is incomplete indeed, unless he can
kill the preachers who will come for five
thousand dollars. But he must go to and
fro with his imperfect theory. It is spoiled
by the rights of other preachers. Thus,
against all labour unions not strictly moral,
the laws of the human race rise up. The
rights of mankind oppose them. All society
is founded upon the rights of man — not of
the man who works for three dollars a day,
but of the man also who works for one dollar
or for any sum whatever. Any force in
a labour union means anarchy. A guild,
without violence, may be imperfect, but,
with violence, it is infamous.

The Message of David Swing

"Where would our city and perhaps our
Kation have been in this September, had not
the labourers in the town of Pullman and in
the whole land been for the most part law-
abiding? The churches may confess the
rashness of the strike, but we must forgive
the mistakes of those who respected the rights
of mankind and the laws of the land. Many
toilers were so patient and law-abiding as to
give promise of being worthy citizens of a
great country. What all those workmen
need is a leadership worthy of their cause or
their flag.

The flag of labour is a perfectly glorious
one — too grand to be carried by a fanatic or
a simpleton or a criminal. Capital is nothing
until labour takes hold of it. A bag will
hold money, but a bag cannot transform
that money into an iron road, a bridge, a
train of cars, an engine. An armful of bonds
did not fling the bridge over the arm of the
sea at Edinburgh ; the bonds of England
did not join the Mediterranean to the Ked
Sea ; gold did not erect St. Peter's at Eome ;
nor did it lift up any of the sublime or beau-
tiful things in any art. Money came along
and attempted to buy the canvases of Angelo,
but it did not paint them. The millions of
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The Duty of the Pulpit

people who came here last summer did not
come to see the millions of money, but to see
what labour had done with money, and they
saw a great spectacle. What domes ! "What
arches ! What " Courts of Honour " ! What
canals ! What statues ! What machines !
What pictures! What jewels! What
thought ! What taste ! What love ! And
yet the whole scene was the matchless em-
blazonry of labour. As God manifests Him-
self in the external objects of earth and in
the millions of stars, thus man speaks by his
works, and in our world labour sits enthroned.-
Capital is a storehouse of seeds ; labour is
their field, their soil, their rain, and their
summer time. Over a potency so vast and
godlike, only Wisdom herself should preside.
If our age has any great men — men whose
hearts are warm and pure, and whose minds
are large as the world, — it should ask them
to preside over the tasks and wages of the
labourer. Anarchy, Crime, and Folly should
be asked to stand back. Those three demons
may be called to the front when our labourers
are seeking for poverty and disgrace.

You have all heard of the hostility of
capital to labour. But there is no special
truth in the phrase. Labour is just as hostile
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The Message of David Swing

to labour. The whole truth is this : Man is
not anxious to spend his money. There is a
saying that " the fool and his money are soon
parted," but we have not reached the maxim
that labour loves to make presents to labour.
Did you ever know a blacksmith who was
happy to pay large bills to the plumber ?
Are the carpenters anxious to have their
tailors advance the price of a suit of clothes ?
Are the " walking delegates " for the plaster-
ers anxious to pay the farmer a dollar for
wheat ? If reports be true, there are labour-
ing men in the West who are so hostile to
the labour of their brothers that they are
going to buy most all needful things in the
shops of England.

Thus labour is as great an enemy of labour
as it is of capital. The hostility between
labour and money is a mischievous fiction,
gotten up by dreamers and professional
grumblers, who wish to ride into office or
fame by parading a love for the multitude.
This false love ought soon to end its destruc-
tive career. Last June and July it cost the
working men many millions of dollars. Had
some walking delegates of Christianity told
these men that labour and capital are eternal
friends — that labour is the language of
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The Duty of the Pulpit

money, the body it assumes, the life it lives,
— our summer would have been full of indus-
try and honour. How could Krupp hate the
men who are doing his will in massive iron ?
How could Field hate the men who were
laying his cable in the ocean ? The Church
must help stamp all our industrial falsehoods
into the dust, and must wave over all men
the flag of brotherhood.

So rapidly has friendship grown between
capital and labour, that a law is now before
the British Parliament looking to a com-
pensation to each labourer or his family for
injuries the working man may have received
in the execution of his task. "When passed,
this law will each year give ten millions of
dollars to the working class of the three
islands. This law is not coming from the
" club " or " gun," but from the Christianity
of England.

This new humane philosophy has counted
all the toilers who have been injured in their
toil. It saw fifty-seven men killed while
building the Forth bridge, and one hundred
and thirty die among the wheels and machines
used in digging the Manchester canal. This
new kindness has studied longer and found
that of each ten thousand men employed on
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The Message of David Swing

the railways, fourteen are killed in a year
and eighty badly crippled. In the long past
there was no love that counted these dead or
injured men. A dead labourer was as a dead
horse or a dead dog. The riots and destruc-
tion and barbarity of last July set back all
this new friendship, and made brotherly love
despair of the present and future. The Evil
One hath done this. Endless abuse, endless
complaint, endless violence, openly taught
anarchy, have succeeded in making work the
enemy of money. You can recall the Bible
story of the person who came at night and
sowed tares among the springing wheat.

The fact that the United States army had
to hasten hither to save life and property
cannot all be charged upon the immigrants
in our land. We have of late years been
producing a group of Americans who care
nothing for right or wrong, and who have
become the masters of all the forms of abuse
and discontent. It is evident that the influx
of anarchists ought to cease, but we must
not forget the crop our Nation is growing out
of its own soil. All the cities seem uniting
to make law ridiculous. The alien who will
sell his vote for a few shillings is not so low
as the American who will prefer these votes
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The Duty of the Pulpit

to principles. The immigrant may act
through the absence of patriotism, for his
new land, but the American acts through
total depravity.

The foreigners are generally manipulated
by political confidence men, who are home-
made.

The general theme of this morning is too
large for the narrow limits of an essay, but
it is possible for us to feel that our great
Christian organism ought to be applied, from
these dark days onward, to the making of
the Christlike character. The Church, Cath-
olic and Protestant, has lived for all other
causes ; let it, at last, live for a high intelli-
gence and for individual righteousness. Lit-
erature and science and the public press will
help the Church. All these wide-open and
anxious eyes must perceive clearly that our
national and personal happiness must come
from the study and obedience of that kind
of ethics which became so brilliant in Pales-
tine. Our Jewish friends need not call it
Christian, and our rationalized minds need
not call it Divine. "What is desirable and
essential is, that its spirit shall sweep over
us. Called by any name, it is a perfect sal-
vation for our country and for each soul.
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The Message of David Swing

The time and money the Church has given
to a metaphysical inquiry and teaching have
been a total loss. In the great college
courses, there are studies in classic language,
and in high mathematics, that strengthen
the intellect; but no such virtue has ever
been found to flow from the theological
studies of the Church. For hundreds of
years the mind has found in these enigmas
its slow doctrine. There, thousands, even
millions, of thinkers have found their grave.
There, the colossal mind of even a Pascal
grew confused and weak. There, great men
have lost their blessed earth while they were
fighting over the incomprehensible. God
did not give man this globe that it might be
made a desert or a battle-field, but that it
might be made the great home of great men.
As often as creeds and dogmas have de-
tached the mind from humanity, literature
and art and science have rushed in to save
the precious things of society. But these
agencies have done this only by carrying, in
prose and verse and science, the laws of love,
duty and justice, by delineating man as a
brother of all men and as a subject in the
mighty kingdom of law and love. In an
age and in a republic marked by an amazing
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The Duty of the Pulpit

effort to turn all things, all days, all life, into
gold, our pulpits must make a new effort to
reveal and create man the spiritual being,
man temperate, man studious, man a lover
of justice, man the brother, man Christlike.
The same science that is seeking and finding
the sources of wealth, and that is filling the
young mind with longings to become rich,
can find and teach all the worth of man as a
spiritual being, and can compel a great na-
tion and a great manhood to spring up from
the philosophy of the soul.

To reach a result so new and so great, the
pulpit must select new themes. It must cull
them from the field where the mob raves,
from the shops where men labour, from the
poverty in which many die, from the oflice
• where wealth counts its millions. Even so
beclouded a pagan as Virgil sang that when
the mob is throwing stones and firebrands,
and is receiving weapons from its fury, if
Wisdom will only become visible and speak
to it, it will listen, and at last obey. We
have the mob ; it is high time for a divine
Wisdom to speak to it.

Our planet not only rolls on in the em-
brace of the laws of gravitation, of light and
heat, vegetable and animal life, and the
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The Message of David Swing

strange encoinpassment of the electric ether,
but it flies onward amid spiritual laws far
more wonderful — laws of labour and rest,
laws of mental and moral progress, laws of
perfect justice and of universal love. Oh,
that God, by His almighty power, may hold
back our Nation from destruction for a few
more perilous years, that it may learn where
lie the paths, in which, as brothers just and
loving, all may walk to the most of excel-
lence and the most of happiness !

196

Addresses and Papers
Foreign

A KOMAN HOME

A Letter to his Friend Ximines, from Tiro, a
Slave of Cicero 1

DEAR XIMINES :

I am still near the spot where my
master was murdered. I am in his deserted
library, and from a place so full of sacred
memory, I must now write to you a long
letter with the long-promised grave and light
particulars about this greatest of the Eomans.
As though you were a woman, you beg to
know all about the house and the wife and
the children, and even the table and the en-
tire private life of this orator. The wish is

1 Marcus Tullius Tiro, a Greek slave belonging to
Cicero. He was made a freedraan, and was Cicero's
librarian and amanuensis. He is believed to have much
improved the art of stenography. This imaginary letter,
while quoting from genuine "Familiar Epistles" of
Cicero, is supposed to have been written by Tiro to his
friend Ximines. It gives graphic details of Roman cus-
toms, and much concerning the life and death of the
great orator, who was killed December 7, 43 B. c.
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The Message of David Swing

well enough ; because you can thus compare
Eome with Athens. Your wish shall be
gratified in part, for the cruel death of my
kind master only last week renders sacred
even the small things that now come up to
notice or to memory. Even this double ink-
stand, with black ink in one side and red in
the other, recalls the dead, for it is the very
one which my Cicero shook up when he said
he must write more distinctly to his brother
Quintus.

Does it seem so to you ? — but I have in-
deed been the secretary and librarian of this
Eornan for twenty years. You. remember
that when I was a mere lad in Athens and
was being taught the two great languages
and all letters that I might be a literary
slave to some of the Athenians, Cicero, who
was then in our city to study rhetoric with
old Demetrius, formed quite an attachment to
me, and hoped to call me some day to Rome.
Twenty years have now passed since he sent
for me and paid my former master a large
sum for his literary slave, Tiro.

That you may know how light my bondage
for these years has been, and how well quali-
fied I am to speak about his domestic life, I
must insert an extract here from the almost
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A Roman Home

daily letters which Cicero sent me when he
was absent, and when I was sick at Tusculum.

" I did not imagine, dear Tiro, that I should
have been so little able to bear your absence,
but indeed it is almost beyond endurance.
Should you embark immediately you would
overtake me at Leucas. But if you are in-
clined to defer your voyage till your recovery
shall be more confirmed, let me entreat you
to be careful in selecting a safe ship, and be
careful that you sail in good weather, and
not without a convoy. It is true I am ex-
tremely desirous of your company, and as
early as possible, but the same affection which
makes me wish to see you soon makes me
wish to see you well."

And I must add here, lest I forget it, that
my master never struck me nor scolded me,
nor did he ever treat any of his slaves with
any cruelty. Some of the Romans do indeed
abuse their servants, and one matron recently
ordered one of her dressing maids put to
death because she arranged badly, or made
some error in the toilet of her mistress ; but
I never saw any such inhumanity in the house
of my great master. I must insert here an
extract from another letter :
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The Message of David Swing

"I dispatched a letter to you from this
place yesterday, where I continued all day
waiting for my brother, and this I write just
as we are setting out, and before sunrise. If
you have any regard for us, but particularly
for me, show it by your care to reestablish
your health. It is with great impatience I
expect to meet you at Leucas ; but if that
cannot be, my next wish is that I may find
Mario there with a letter. We all, but more
particularly I myself, long to see you ; how-
ever, we would by no means, dear Tiro, in-
dulge ourselves in that pleasure unless it may
be consistent with your health. I can forego
your assistance, but your health, my dear Tiro,
I would love to see restored, partly for your
own sake — partly for mine. Farewell.

"Alyzia, Nov.,' 5 A. M., 703 A. U. C."

Such kind letters he continually wrote me,
and so many, that now I have quite a num-
ber of them, and how valuable they are, since
the}7" make me feel not that I passed long
years of painful servitude with such a man,
but instead, long years of elevating com-
panionship.

When coining hither, so many years ago,
on reaching the harbour nearest the Formian
Yilla, I found on the shore quite a crowd of
people and an assortment of conveyances,
much like those we have at home ; there
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A Roman Home

were carriages for those who had furthest to
go ; there were litters for those who lived
only a few stadia over the hills. I inquired
for the house of Cicero, and was pointed to a
man as being the good Konian himself. In
a plain but elegant litter sat my future mas-
ter. In another elegant one with embroid-
ered curtains sat his wife Terentia Cicero,
and the little daughter Tullia. These litters
were resting on their wooden braces, while
the sixteen slaves, whose business it was to
carry them, were lounging around in the sun,
almost every one of them, having his hand
full of ripe figs at which he was munching
cheerfully. Cicero had come partly to meet
me, but partly from the custom the rich fami-
lies have of going to the harbour, when they
see a vessel coming in. This great Roman
Demosthenes seemed glad to meet me, and as
we went home, I walked alongside his litter,
and as the curtains were looped up, he talked
all the while in a most elegant manner. He
found me quite familiar with recent and old
books, and at each discovery that I could
speak both Latin and Greek correctly, his
face brightened.

I then thought him a very homely man.
He was thin and pale, and his neck was very
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The Message of David Swing

long. When he reached over the rail to look
forward or back, his neck seemed long as
that of a crane. But amid the beauty of his
character, the plainness of his person passed
away. Terentia seemed cold and unbending
and did not so much as speak to me, but
Tullia, the little daughter, called out to me
to ask if I would not help her get out her
lessons in Greek.

Did you know, Ximines, that the wealthy
Eomans do not limit themselves to one coun-
try place ? In addition to a costly city resi-
dence, my master had fourteen villas for his
summer or winter pleasure. "Wherever an
island or a harbour or a hill especially pleased
him, he bought or built a house, and several
places were given him by wealthy friends,
who were or might be his clients in law, or
who were moved by simple friendship. Many
large sums were given to this lawyer in the
wills of those who had been near him in life.

Happy summers we spent sailing or jour-
neying to and fro among these beautiful
places of rest. The Tusculum Yilla was the
favourite of us all, and the chief of the group.
It was in the border of Rome. From it we
could see all the public buildings in the one
direction and all the beauty of hill and vale
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A Roman Home

and water and sky in another. Here were
our library, our pictures, our statuary, our
best gardens and fields, our fowls, geese,
ducks, pheasants, peacocks and pigeons. My
master's city residence was costly, and was
wonderful in its ornaments and apartments,
but we all loved more the resort out at Tus-
culum. That city home, Clodius, the consul,
in the depth of malice, ordered to be razed
to the ground when he banished Cicero. For
days the mob and also the better people could
be seen carrying off fragments or ornaments
or plunder from that overthrown palace.
But a change of consuls soon came and
Rome recalled the exile and rebuilt our city
house.

Our Tusculum villa is built much like a
general's camp, the soul being in the centre,
the body, the impedimenta, being located all
around the valuable part. The main hall of
the villa is the soul. Here is the conversa-
tion, here the beauty, here the feast, here the
art, here the whole family. All around are
the shops and sleeping bunks of the servants.
This villa is approached through a long lane
of dwarf box. This accommodating shrub is
trimmed and bent into the shapes of animals
in a pretty or grotesque manner. Rampant
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The Message of David Swing

lions and the panther so much seen in the
games, the peacock and other birds, are
on either hand as you approach the
main entrance of the house. The structure
measures about a hundred feet across the
front and extends back fully two hundred
feet. The exterior is set apart for rooms for
the artisan slaves. Our carpenter has one,
our tailor one, our groom one, our cook one,
and thus on until the family is in the midst
of quite an army of these domestic troops.
Like almost all the Roman houses it is built
of brick, but some parts of it are lined with
marble. But Rome is a brick city, the bricks
being about one span square.

Entering this large square by a beautiful
gate, you are passed inward by the keepers,
and after a few steps you come into the great
hall, which is the home of the Cicero family.
Marble columns support the roof, which is
raised high above the head. Marble is under
foot. All around one stands statuary, most
of which come from Greek towns. The side
walls are made of stucco, and these are ex-
quisitely painted. To the height of a man
above the floor, the colours are dark, and the
figures are set ones, but above that the colours
are very bright and the figures either perfect
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A Roman Home

vines and flowers, or else images of human
and divine ideals. In this immense room we
ate and talked, and played and laughed, and
gave parties, and danced and were happy,
until death entered the gate to break up this
island of the blessed. In some Eoman houses
in the city there are steps to lead up to a
second story, but this is rarely the case.
The bedchambers are recesses from the great
hall and sometimes there is one sleeping berth
above another, and the one who sleeps above
climbs up by two pins inserted in the masonry.

At Tusculum, my master had a bedroom
made for himself in the rear of the building.
He had ordered deadened walls on all sides,
and a window that he could darken ; that
when he had been up late at night he might
not be disturbed by that clatter of all kinds
made by the slaves, nor be awakened by the
too obtrusive sunshine of the morning.

The library was a room with the walls on
all sides arranged for books. Each book
had its little cell, like the holes in which our
pigeons live. It was not my place to take
care of the volumes, but to read them to my
master and to his family and friends ; and to
be forever seeking for new truths or ideas
or beauties for the great orator's happiness
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and use. He had a slave who looked after
the binding and dusting and arranging of
the works. Cicero would not permit a dirty
cover to remain on a volume, nor a soiled
label. All must be bright and cheerful, much
as the good man was himself. One set of
books he had such as I never saw at Athens
— books full of portraits. He had seven
hundred portraits of distinguished Eomans.
As Brutus and Caesar had the same pictures
in their libraries, I concluded and heard that
there was some shop where one picture could
be multiplied until all could have copies ;
but I have not yet found that ingenious
shop.

Our library is ornamented in fine manner
by paintings and statuary. Now I remember
how mad my master was, when, having
ordered Atticus to buy him some good pieces
in Greece, that erring friend shipped to us a
lot of cupids and nymphs. My master did not
want such stuff in his rooms.

Passing out of the library, one comes to
the flower-garden and fish-ponds and poultry-
yard. How much that great Cicero did love
his geese and peacocks and chickens and
pigeons! Even when he knew he must
make an important speech that day, and
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A Roman Home

when he was full of care about the oration,
he would yet take the time in the morning
to go out and see how the pigeons and
pheasants were getting along. I have known
him to pay a large sum for two pigeons'
eggs that he heard would hatch out some
rare species. In the flower-garden and
among the fruit trees, the dinner and supper
were often served in the summer months. I
often read aloud while the family ate. I
loved thus to read, for the grass under foot
secured for us such a silence that reading and
hearing were more delightful.

Permit me now to rest you a little, dear
Ximines, by leading you from the small to
the great, for you know, dear friend, the
soul is so constructed that it can find rest in
going from the little to the large, or from
the large to the little. Man can walk a
circle with less fatigue if at times he changes
his direction. Let me tell you about Cicero
as a student and an orator. He was wider
in his tastes than our Demosthenes. You
know our orator loved only matters of State,
but this Koman loved all books and all
things. He read everything he could find.
If I found a good passage I went to him
with it, perfectly assured that he would en-
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The Message of David Swing

joy it whether it was prose or poetry, or law
or religion or geography, or only a piece for
exciting laughter. In one way or another,
all he saw or heard or read, helped him in
either his public speeches or his conversa-
tions. All that went into his brain came out
again in some better shape.

He will live in the world's fame as an
orator, but I shall remember with deepest
pleasure his fun and talk at home. Every
evening friends came in. There were Tre-
batius and Hortensius and Atticus and Kufus
and Brutus and Cato, and by degrees my
master would become aroused, and all even-
ing long he would pour forth jokes and anec-
dotes or else would quote gems from the
poets. He was a mimic of manners, and
would keep all delighted by mimicking all
the bad and eccentric speakers of the city
and the clowns of the day. Grave as my
master was in his public addresses, he filled
some of his letters to friends and sometimes
the rooms of justice and always our home,
with sayings that led to much laughter and
much good cheer. In all the letters he
wrote to the young lawyer, Trebatius, who
had gone with Caesar on his British expedi-
tion, there were seldom any words except
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those of pure humour. He expressed in one
of them the opinion that his friend had gone
over the sea, that he might be the greatest
lawyer now living in Britain. In another
he opines that the reason why his friend had
remained carefully away from battle could
not be found in any cowardice, but it must
have been in the unwillingness of a student
of law to be guilty of making an assault. In
one of the replies of Trebatius, there were
signs that some former writing had been
erased to leave the page blank for the letter
to Cicero. In the next missile to this absent
friend, Cicero expressed a wonder what could
have been on that paper that could have made
it less valuable than the proposed letter — he
concluded that what was erased " must have
been one of your own [Trebatius'] briefs."

When Yerres was upon trial for defraud-
ing the people of Sicily, for stealing statuary
and jewels and pictures, and for assessing
and collecting most unjust taxes, Hortensius
defended, and Cicero prosecuted the accused.
It was known to my master that Yerres had
sent to his attorney a valuable piece of
marble — an Egyptian Sphynx. In the course
of the examination of witnesses, Hortensius
became angry at one of those on the side of
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the prosecution, and thundered out that he
wanted no riddles but a plain statement of
facts. Cicero said calmly, u Hortensius, you
should be glad to get a supply of riddles
since you have at home such a valuable
sphynx." This quite upset the gravity of
the crowd, and all laughed over the predica-
ment of the distinguished Hortensius.

There was a form of literary sport which
was my master's great delight — a double use
of a word ; a use in which the hidden import
would suddenly spring up, bringing always
a pleasure. These double-edged words he
loved to send off to this same fun-loving
Trebatius. He reminded him that the win-
ters would be cold up in Gaul, but that his
regimentals, when they should come, would
keep out much cold ; and that Caesar would
perhaps have some hot work for him ; and
that upon the whole he was not so hopeless
as a soldier as he was as a lawyer. Trebatius
having remained on the peaceful side of a
river while Caesar went over to fight, Cicero
congratulated the friend that he had so far
eliminated all ill-will from his heart that he
had become unwilling even to cross water ! ! !

Indeed I shall not deny that to see the
housetops covered with people and the streets
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densely crowded with a multitude, all silent
to hear Cicero speak against the cruel Yerres,
or the despot Antony, was a great spectacle
and one which it was my fortune often to
witness, but, for some reason, my own mem-
ory will cherish most those evenings in the
villas when the jokes were so good and all
were so perfectly happy. Julius Ca3sar at
one time determined to gather up in a little
volume all the Cicero stories and witticisms
he could find, but I fear that the last five
years of Caesar's life were passed in so much
war and turmoil that he never prosecuted
his intention. At none of the bookstores do
I find any such volume. I need no such
volume, but the laughing world will.

My master spoke much like the orators
we have seen and heard in Athens. He imi-
tated and he acted as he spoke. He threw
himself about from place to place on the
rostrum and seemed to have in him the souls
of a whole company of men. When he first
began speaking in public, he was so full of
action and passion that he injured his health
and was compelled to leave Eome and seek
peace abroad. He spoke just as do the act-
ors in the theatres, changing his face and
voice to suit each style of the changing
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thought and argument. He had an extreme
ambition and seemed to know in youth that
he was destined to be great. When he en-
tered the law some wanted him to change
his name, for Cicero meant only a vegetable.
They told him it did not sound large enough.
He said in reply that he would keep his
father's name and make it sound honourable.
He wore out his health in a few years and
sailed to Greece for rest. On his return, he
assumed a manner a little more quiet but it
was still very full of action. But, my good
friend, he was a wonderful man. I always
attended him when he was to make a speech
that when he came to write it out fully after-
wards, I could aid him if he had lost any
particular thought or the structure of a sen-
tence. I have known the lawyers opposed
in a case to my master to venture no reply
but to abandon their cause after Cicero had
made his opening speech.

A rather amusing event took place while
Caesar was dictator, only a few years ago.
A case was before Caesar. The evidence
having been all taken, Caesar was about to
give his judgment and had declared that no
speeches need be made as his mind had been
made up fully that the person charged was
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guilty. Cicero arose to make a brief volun-
tary plea. Caesar said jokingly that he had
not heard Cicero for so long that it would
be rather pleasant to hear the good fellow-
speak once again. He heard him ; got
amazed and highly wrought up, and dis-
charged the accused as being the most inno-
cent man of his acquaintance.

Ah, my Ximines, let me tell you more now
of the home life of the dead orator and
master, more dear to me as a master than as
an orator. Let me tell you briefly about the
social scenes in our city house, and also in
the villa at Tusculum. One of our largest
reunions . of friends was given when Cicero's
only daughter Tullia had just begun to
attract the attentions of Roman lovers. As
soon as night had fully come the friends be-
gan to pour in. Some came by carriages,
some by the popular litter. At last you
could have seen gathered in the hall Julius
Caasar and his wife ; Decimus Brutus and
Marcus Brutus, Cato, Hortensius, Marcus
Antony, Crassus, Quintus Cicero, the brother
of my Marcus, Pompey and Publius, Crassus
Atticus, Casca, and a hundred other such
notable men. Not any less was the number
of the noble women and maidens. Pomponia,
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the wife of Cicero's brother, came early and
had begun to chat with her sister-in-law.
Cornelia, the daughter of Metellus Scipio,
was there dressed in plain, but rich costume,
for she was a woman of intellect rather than
of dress. She resembled the Cornelia of
Gracchi fame. The La3lia girls were pres-
ent in all their style of costume and beauty
of face. There were three of them, and
they might have stood for three Graces. The
talk that Cicero thought too highly of these
daughters was all old time gossip.

In this throng were not a few of the
Roman "pretty men," homo bellus. The
lellus homo is a man wholly devoted to
fashion and dress and pleasure. The number
of these has greatly increased of late years.
The young men in general seem to be of
this sleek and effeminate school. The sons
of the great senators and orators are for
the most part idle, pretty men, who part
their hair with the utmost precision and
smell of all the perfumes of the South. They
wear snow-white robes, and powder like
women to make white their bare arms ; and
in the wearing of rings they equal any
matron of this dying Eepublic. These
youths gathered that night in one corner of
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the great hall, and with a few equally silly
girls they hummed over part of Kile love-
songs, and lounged in the large soft seats de-
signed for the ladies of rank.

Most of the love-songs here locate their
scenes of romance and the actors in the
scenes over on the Nile ; not only because
Cleopatra has introduced there an era of
sentiment, but rather because the spirit of
romance always finds its ideal land away
from home, there being no witchery in
things that are near. I remember that we
boys at Athens sang of Roman adventure,
but coming hither I found the Roman young
souls locating the exploits of successful and
unsuccessful love as far as possible away
from all existing realities. It must belong
to human nature to cover up with enchant-
ment hills and vales and peoples that are
just beyond the eye's field of vision.

At times I heard some elegant measures
from some thoughtful poet, but for the most
part these brainless youths sang little verses
of which I may give you here a fair sample :

If you would live your life
In the light of woman's smile,

And escape all toil and strife,
Then away to the Nile !
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The Message of David Swing

There my barge may float all night
On the love-creating stream,

Where the soft and amber light
Changes life into a dream.

My love is in the boat

And I am by her side ;
Oh, let me ever float

On this love-produciug tide.

In Kome at all hours of the night one can
hear some part of this shape of song rising
up from the streets, and so fully alive is the
whole city to the romance of love affairs,
that even old men whistle these tunes as they
plod along to work or to idleness, generally
to idleness, for none but slaves pursue any
toilsome occupation.

Of this trifling class was Cicero's son
Marcus. At least, while he was away in
Greece at school, word often came to us that
he was living in a dissipated manner and
was spending much more money than had
been allowed him. But not of this foolish
class was the daughter Tullia. She resem-
bled her father in her love of learning and of
wise conversation, and thus when our parties
were given this beautiful girl was found
talking with Caesar or Pollio or Archias,
rather than with the fops at the other end of
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the corridor. Had I not been only a servant,
it would have been an immeasurable joy
could I have sought and gained her love.
As things were, I confess, my dear Ximines,
my heart beat quickly with happiness when
she would request me to bring her a certain
volume and read for the company, at her
command, some sentiment that had given her
delight. My partiality, perhaps, made me
admire her dress more than the magnificent
toilet of Cassar's wife or the gay attire of
the LaBlia daughters. On this particular
evening Tullia wore over her wine-coloured
dress a delicately tinted pink scarf which
quite enfolded her. It had a still brighter
border. Her hair was heaped up rather
negligently on her head, and was held in
place by a gold arrow. As she played on
the harp and sang, she showed a sandal with
a rim of gold all around the sole, and a per-
fect network of pearls covering the instep of
her almost sacred foot. Add to these orna-
ments a golden ball which she would at
times toss to some, and from which would
gush forth a little cloud of perfumed dust,
and you can see this loved and now wept-for
Tullia. I used to wonder what the great
father would have said or done had I ever
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taken by the hand that beautiful being, or
had I ever addressed a note of affection to
her. Now that both are dead I am glad
that my insane love never ventured forth in
formal language.

On this evening we had for the feast all
the fish and fowls and fruits known to
Roman or Greek, and the most elegant
wines. Cicero loved glassware with quite
a passion, and his engraved goblets were
passed freely about, filled with their nectar
of Bacchus. Cassar, the most distinguished
of our guests, ate but little, but you should
have seen him eat once at our Formian1
house. He announced that he was intending
to have a full feast, and feast he did, for he
intended on rising from dinner to take an
emetic, and spare himself the pain of digest-
ing such a load of meat and fruit and wine.
You know the feast-goers often do this — eat
all they can, with the intention of taking,
after the meal, this " emetikon." The glut-
tons do it, not that they may escape distress,
but that they may return and eat a second
dinner the same night. They create a
stomach like that of the vulture, which can
load and unload almost at pleasure.

1 This villa of Cicero's was in Formiae, Italy.
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For another reason Caesar's visit to our
Formian village was remarkable, for he
brought with him a thousand men, soldiers
and friends. Most of them encamped in the
garden, but my master had to feed all out-
side the environs and to entertain the impor-
tant men of the number within the walls,
and they ate and drank in a most hearty
manner. Next day, when the company had
departed to the last man, Cicero came up to
me in the library, and remarked, with a grave
face : " Caesar is indeed a very notable guest,
but he is not one of those fellows to whom,
on his going, one says, ' Call again.5 "

My master was no feasting man. There
were only a few simple things he could eat.
No fish or oyster could he digest, and even
after all the care he took of his health he suf-
fered all the years I was with him. He drank
wine, but seldom to excess. Only one night
is recalled now when he came home with his
intellect clouded by wine. He had been
out spending the evening with two fellow
lawyers, and coming home about midnight
he did not as usual come into the library,
but he passed straight to his room. In the
morning he mentioned, with regret, that he
feared he had drank so much the night

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The Message of David Swing

before as to expel his wits, for his com-
panions had asked him for an opinion of a
law point and he now felt that he had
given a foolish reply. On consulting the
reports I found that my master had not
been very drunk after all. The question
that had been raised at the neighbour's was,
whether an heir to an estate could bring
action for damages the estate had sustained
before it actually came into his possession,
he being the legal heir apparent ?

My dear Ximines, I must give you rest from
these small matters, by telling you now in
rapid succession of four large events ; I may
call them the four dark days of all the long
years. In their books the Egyptians and the
Persians tell of days when the sun did not
shine, but showed a black, sullen face ; when
the wild bird flew to its nest, and the cattle
bellowed and groaned in the fields. Be these
stories true or not, dark days came to our
house. First came the divorce of the wife
and mother, Terentia. On a certain day,
only five years ago, this wife and mother
bade Tullia farewell, and left the home
where she had been through all the period
of her girlhood and middle life. I saw little
reason for such a crisis in the house. I am
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positive that the event came so gradually
that all the parties — the husband and wife
and daughter — were already reconciled to
it when it came really to pass. My master
had had many great trials, and under them
was growing old. He needed perfect peace
in his home, and constant praise from all.
Terentia managed badly all the money
matters. She never praised in any manner
her famous husband : but on the opposite, set
up an opposition of feeling, if I may so speak.
Cicero was himself so great that he filled the
house to such a degree that there was no
room for another. Tullia was full of demon-
stration over all her father's speeches and
writings ; and as she drew ever nearer her
father, the mother to that degree receded.
By degrees Terentia began to look away
towards the house of her own father as
offering her an asylum, and with the large
dowry handed back to her, which she had
brought Cicero in her youth, she went away
from our villas forever. It is a good quality
of Eoman law that a man who puts aside his
wife must first restore to her the dowry
she brought him in her days of youth and
beauty. She could not come rich and go
away poor.

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The Message of David Swing

No sooner had our home circle recovered
from this calamity than there came the
greatest one that could have assailed the
tender heart of my master. Tullia suddenly
died. In about her twentieth year, this
daughter, whom he had called the " honey
sweet," took away from earth her blessed
face and language.

She had been married, but yet her father's
home was almost all the time cheered by her
presence ; and when the word came from her
sick room that the disease had become sud-
denly alarming, the grief of the illustrious
father was most extreme. Death came very
suddenly. All the deep philosophy of my
master failed him. Letters from all the great
men of the land came to him, bearing all
forms of consolation, and some full of reproof
that such a statesman should be so broken
down by the death of only a daughter. But
letters brought no softening of the affliction.
We withdrew to our villa of Astura, because,
being upon an island, it offered the broken
heart two blessings — security against the
intrusion of man, and the presence of all the
sweetness of nature. Here, in this lonely
place, my master did not even desire my
presence any longer, but alone, every morn-
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A Roman Home

ing, he would walk away to the woods, and
would not, perhaps, until evening emerge
from their sympathetic shadows. He was
also alone much in his library, and, entering
it in his absence, I would find on his table
outlines of monuments and forms of epitaphs.
His heart, unable any longer to look for-
ward, was thus looking back. Life has been
awfully injured when it looks only back.

The tragic fate of Caesar soon followed, to
conceal the tomb of the " honey sweet daugh-
ter." All the patriots, and all the rivals of
Caesar, too, had feared that the Ides of March
would see him declared king. The friends
of this royal movement had pretended to find
oracular dictates that only a king could con-
quer the Parthians. As the Ides drew near,
the city became restless and suspicious in all
ways at once. On the morning of the Ides
we all went to the Senate. By noon Cicero
and I, his servant, were in our places, anx-
ious, but uncertain. My master knew of no
conspiracy. All began to wonder that Caesar
did not come to preside, for there seemed to
be business awaiting transaction. I learned
that night that Caesar had resolved, as by
mere accident, to stay at home until the
much talked of Ides should have passed by.
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The Message of David Swing

That morning his wife had told him that she
had dreamed that he had come flying to her
in the night, saying, " Save me ! " This
helped detain Caasar. He had also gone out
in the garden in the morning to note how
his doves and pheasants would fly when he
should feed them or call them. They came
up on his left hand. This also helped him
in his resolution to let that day pass by in the
most possible of retirement. The conspira-
tors, finding the day passing and that their
victim would perhaps not come to the forum,
made out a pressing demand for the imagi-
nary king, and sent down a messenger to
Caesar's house, telling him that a case of
importance was being argued, and that the
Senate would be gratified if he would come
and preside. He at once dismissed his secret
forebodings, and ordering out his litter, en-
tered and was borne along to the assembly.
To a watchman on the street he remarked
pleasantly : " Ah, friend, the Ides of March
have come, and have brought no trouble."
" Come, but not gone ! " was the reply.

Seated upon his Chair of State in the Curia

Pompeii, Caasar asked that the case be at

once presented. Tullius Cimber then said

that he had a brother in exile whom he would

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now petition the Senate to recall ; and while
pleading for this brother he grew more and
more earnest, and at the end of each sentence
took a step forward as though he would lay
his affectionate pleadings upon the very breast
of Julius. Other senators, too, began to
speak as though the case were one of tre-
mendous importance; and as they spoke
they, too, moved gently forward. It is my
own impression, dear Ximines, that they
overdid their earnestness, and that Caesar's
heart suddenly divined that the eloquence
was full of something more terrible than the
exile of Cimber's brother. Caesar arose from
his seat, but in an instant the dagger of Casca
gleamed and came down. I heard the dead
sound of the blow. In his fearful tremulous-
ness Casca had struck his grand victim only
in the shoulder-blade. Caesar grasped the
dagger, and screamed forth in a loud voice,
"Casca, you villain, what means this?"
"While we all gazed, horror-stricken, sud-
denly other daggers gleamed and struck,
and the great man, muttering some pathetic
words which I could not catch, fell heavily
upon the floor. Some relate that he said,
" And thou, Brutus ! " Others told me next
day that when he saw Brutus raise his dagger,
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The Message of David Swing

he said, " And my son ! Brutus ! " It had
long been rumoured that Brutus was a son
of Caesar.

In a few days after this thrilling event, my
master began to say that it was a great over-
sight in the Kepublicans not to have slain
Antony ; that he was more willing to be a
despot than Julius had been, and that had
the conspirators invited him (Cicero) to their
liberty feast, there was one dish that would
not have been carried away uncarved. My
master despised and feared Mark Antony. I
must close this letter, dear Xirnines, by telling
you how this enmity soon hurried my Cicero
out of life. When Antony and Octavius and
Lepidus formed the second Triumvirate, and
deceived the people by giving them three
tyrants instead of one, each two of the Tri-
umvirs conceded to the other the privilege
of putting to death his greatest enemy.
Lepidus demanded Lucius Caesar; Octavius
demanded Paulus ; Antony asked the life of
Cicero.

We were at the Tusculum villa. A mes-
senger came in fearful haste, his horse almost
falling from fatigue. Cicero and his brother
went out to meet him, and in a few moments
came back into the great hall. Cicero said
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to me, calmly : " Antony has condemned me
to death." My heart sunk. I was in a mo-
ment glad that Tullia had passed to the
grave, which has no fresh sorrow. A group
of servants were called, both boatmen and
porters, and, having gotten ready the most
essential things, we hurried to Astura, one
of my master's villas, a few stadia away.
Should we reach that point, from there we
should sail for Macedonia. But there was
little hope of a final escape from the wide
domain of Rome. The road was literally
sprinkled with our tears. When we halted,
each stood with an arm around his friend,
and Cicero and his brother embraced each
other many times, and bade many farewells ;
for, in my master, friendship was as vast a
thing as learning or eloquence.

We sailed from Astura, but, after a day
out in tough weather, Cicero grew sick, and
at the same time he felt a great longing to
risk his native land, or die upon its soil. He
made our seamen sail into a harbour where
we had a villa, and there we all disembarked.
The porters took up the litter and bore him
to our beautiful Formian house. Here we
had known happy times in the past. When
we had gotten into the ample hall, he said,
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The Message of David Swing

"Let me die here, in the country I have
attempted so often to save."

He lay down to sleep. It was the 7th of
December. In only a few moments, servants
came in from remote parts of the farm, say-
ing that horsemen were coming towards the
house. The porters did not wait for the
order or even the permission of Cicero, but,
affectionately taking him up, they laid him
in the litter, and told him they must go back
to the ship. "We had advanced only a hun-
dred paces when the assassins closed up
around the baffled group. The slaves set
down the litter. Cicero parted the curtains,
and reaching out his head, gray with age
and trouble, he addressed one of the pursuers
by name, and said : " Strike me, if you think
it is right." The bloody men halted an in-
stant. The face before them was calm and
noble. The hearts, conscious of guilt, faltered,
but only for an instant. Herrennius, who
had dismounted, stepped forward, and, with
a half dozen ill-aimed and cruel blows, he
severed the head from the body. The body
remained in the litter ; the head rolled over
on the earth beneath. The hands, too, were
cut off and were borne to Antony, who or-
dered them to be fastened up in the Forum,
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where the lips and hands, too, had been so
eloquent against kings.

My dear Ximines, I heard this matchless
speaker deliver more than thirty great ora-
tions, and I have read all his books and let-
ters, and am thus familiar with the utter-
ances, public and private, of his great soul,
but, to my memory, no words of his come
now with more significance or beauty than
those uttered in the last days of his life : " I
try to make my enmities transient, and my
friendships eternal."

Your friend,

TIRO.

Tusculum Villa, Dec. 19, A. U. C. 710.
[The year 4.8 B. (?.]

231

XI
DANTE1

EACH myth is probably believed by the
tribes which first utter it. Children
are often six or seven years old before they
turn away from the realism of Santa Claus
and his sleigh, but no lapse of years can turn
the mind away from Santa Claus as a sym-
bol. To us who are oldest the myth is just
as valuable as it was when it was not a myth
but a truth to the mind of our childhood.
By the time a race has reached the power to
produce a literature it has passed the period
of belief in its own wonderland. What was
once true turns into mental furniture, orna-
ment, available capital, a pictorial language.
We Americans have just as much use for
Hercules as Yirgil had, because the story en-
ables us to express the difficulty of cleaning
the Augaaan stables of a city, and to slay that
Lernasan Hydra which infests each metrop-
olis of the American Occident and Orient.

1 Born in May, 1261 ; died September 14, 1321 A. D.

232

Dante

It is impossible to learn now how much
Homer believed of his own tale, but it seems
almost certain that he dealt with the dog
Kerberus just as the Egyptians had used the
animal before Homer and exactly as our
Milton made use of the Hell Hound in recent
years.

Some Greek realist of the Socratic period
said that Homer ought to be removed from
Greek thought, because he taught the people
a mass of fables ; but the human family has
not regarded the suggestion, for fables are
what we all want. We do not feel them as
truth, but as powerful illustrations of truth.
We want them as language. We do not
want Lot's wife as a pillar of salt, but we do
desire to keep in mind that if an educated
and beautiful woman starts towards some
noble life and then concludes after all that
she would rather dance and sing in a base-
ment saloon, she ought to be smitten into
some insensate stick, stock or stone. Her
life possesses no value.

It seems just to Dante to look upon him
as making that use of the wonderful to which
Yirgil and Ovid had subjected it, but only
for nobler purposes — for the decorations of
a higher theme. Milton did not believe in
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The Message of David Swing

any of his details, but we all come from the
" Paradise Lost " with the simple feeling
that we have for hours and hours been in a
world above and beyond our setting sun.

When Dante finds a group of souls existing
in the form of trees of which the leaves sigh
in eternal sorrow and drip with a bloody
dew, he simply borrows from Ovid, and
especially from Yirgil, whose companions in
attempting to pull up a shrub are amazed to
hear its roots cry out : " Do not lacerate me
thus, for I am Polydorus." To Dante's
living human trees are added as appropriate
birds the Harpies which had figured at the
camp of JEneas.

Each writer in each successive period
becomes heir to an enormous lot of images
and pictures which become his language.
The personal relation of Yirgii to his myths
was that of Goethe to his Faust, and of Milton
towards his Satan, and of Klopstock towards
his elegant angel Ithuriel. Mr. Hamilton
Mabie delineates in one of his books some
mysterious movements on the part of Nature.
The winds, the black clouds, had been angry
for many hours ; they had in some manner
impressed the lightning and thunder into
the atmospheric misunderstanding ; great
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Dante

volumes of blackness had been flung at the
sun by day and into the face of the moon at
night. The unpleasantness was all a mystery
until daylight having come, our friend threw
open his shutter and saw the apple trees in full
bloom. We now dismiss all the intellectual
machinery of which the writer made use and
simply thank him for dispelling our stupidity
and coaxing us to look at a blossoming
orchard. He did not believe in any quarrel
in the upper air. Thus Homer, Yirgil, Dante,
Milton and Shakespeare are all practical
common-sense men, but they are rich in
intellectual furniture. Their ability to put a
truth on a stage was wonderful. But Dante
and Beatrice are not a piece of absolute
realism. The sweet girl was much more
loved than many, but so was Yirgil a favourite
of Dante. Beatrice was simply the one
blossom, highest and reddest, of a luxuriant
soul. Yirgil, Statius, Eachel and Matilda
all share with Beatrice in this outpoured
love in Dante's great work.

Dante was nearly forty years old when he
toiled at the production of the no w illustrious
poem. He was about thirty years distant
from that boyhood morning in which he
looked with such rapture upon the child
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The Message of David Swing

Beatrice. Whatever may have been the
dazzle of those youthful days, nearly all
thoughtful persons who live in this century
cannot but feel that that romance of the
tenth year could have reached the fortieth
only in the form of a beautiful memory.
Romantic love is one of those small boats
which, although magnificent as the barge of
Cleopatra, is better for a coast service than
for crossing the wide sea. Thirty years are
too wide an ocean ; Dante's bannered barge
did not cross it. But there is an event that
is common — that of a sensitive and noble
mind looking back and bedecking with new
tears the object it kissed long ago. When
cares and misfortunes have been many, and
when the future becomes too small to contain
much of hope, the past all reopens and the
heart arises and says : I will go back to my
father's house. There love and plenty await
me. The more husks and swine about the
feet, the more willing and grand is the re-
turn.

It is quite unjust to Dante to think of him
as " the lover sighing like a furnace, with a
woeful ballad made to his mistress' eye-
brow ; " for although he did inscribe a mighty
sonnet to the eyes of his mistress, he must be
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Dante

granted the credit of having waited until the
love which canie at first sight had been sub-
dued by all the worldly events of more than
thirty years. He was, indeed, wonderfully
sentimental, but he was also a soldier, a
statesman, a scholar. Beatrice was only a
colour thrown over a varied life like the
colour of a sunset, whose hues turn sky, land
and trees, living or dead, into pure gold.
But there was nothing of the weak young
man in the nature of Dante. His era was
romantic. To be in love was the privilege
of each separate person ; and so open-hearted
were the Italians that the new or the old
attachments of each one were matters of
confession and common conversation equalled
in our day by the themes of science or poli-
tics.

Dante and Beatrice were parallelled in the
lives of many men and women of those
intermediate centuries. The Minnesingers
and the errant knights had made song and
love rank as fine arts. It was the wonderful
prevalence and power of love-song that
induced Dante to break friendship with the
Latin language and utter his soul in the cur-
rent words of the people. He wrote the
first part of the "Inferno" in the classic
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The Message of David Swing

tongue, but in the years in which that manu-
script was resting he reached some new
appreciation of the popular speech, and when
he resumed the comedy the thoughts ran out
in harmonious Italian. It is probable that
the Latin tongue had become so associated
with the law and theology of the age that it
seemed unable to be the accompaniment
of the song the poet intended to sing.
Language, like all other objects, is liable to
become the victim of associations. The same
sentimentalism which exalted Beatrice ex-
alted the Italian dialect. The language of
his love overpowered the language of his
theology.

Admitting that all the fashionable people
of that period made romantic love a channel
and expression of culture, we must concede
that Dante possessed a poetic sensibility
which made him almost outdo his own age.
Whatever may be the genius of a time, there
will be leaders in the dominant pursuit or
condition. If the age be scientific, there will
be Newtons ; if it be philosophic, there will
be Lockes and Hamiltons ; if it be religious,
there will be Xaviers and Marquettes. While,
therefore, Dante loved according to the cus-
tom of his times, he was eminent in his de-
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Dante

partment and no doubt surpassed the common
crowd in a kind of adoration of persons. In
our own times it is evident that John Stuart
Mill, Henry Hallain, and Robert Browning
were capable of carrying more than the com-
mon quantity of affection. The death of
young Hallam, of Mrs. Mill, and of Mrs.
Browning were shadows wonderfully deep
in the hearts upon which they fell. Mill
and Hallam never again saw earth in its old
beauty. Those two graves made each sunset
bring tears. Upon Dante there must be seen
falling the full, rich untorn mantle of his
country and epoch. In the midst of love he
was above all ; he was a dashing leader in
the great battle-field of the heart.

The age which made this poet so romantic
also transformed the adored child and woman.
When a girl possessed great beauty and great-
ness of character, she became an emblem
while she lived and almost a divinity after
her death. The world was still so young and
illogical, so wonder-loving, that it personified
all spiritual beauties and virtues. The con-
crete was dearer than the abstract. The
Greeks and Romans worshipped a little army
of Minervas, Junos, Yenuses, Dianas, and
nymphs, because they did not respect the real
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The Message of David Swing

woman enough to tempt their hearts to make
for her a throne or a pedestal. Each Minerva
proclaimed the absence of the real woman.
When woman became great in learning or
talent she declined in morals, and Aspasia
and Cleopatra were so affected by gossip that
when men wished to worship womanhood
they turned towards Minerva rather than
towards the favourites of Pericles and Mark
Antony.

The invasion of the world by the New
Testament wrought a gradual but at last a
radical change. Those gospels and letters
chased the Yenuses and Dianas out of art
and created a demand for such earthly sym-
bols as the Marys and the Magdalens. Ce-
cilia, Teresa, and quite a long roll of human
saints made the worship of Beatrice possible.
Much as the Protestants may be opposed to
the mariolatry of the Koman Catholics, they
should confess the services which the " Ave
Marias " have performed in behalf of woman-
hood. They have taken from the clouds, the
groves, the fountains and the sea the virtues
of a thousand nymphs and have conferred
them upon the terrestrial woman. John
Stuart Mill and his wife make up of woman-
hood a better picture for man than that of
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Dante

Numa Poinpilius and the goddess Egeria.
Since the Mary of Bethlehem came, humanity
has wasted less worship over the chimeras of
the childish ages. It has used all its intel-
lect and sentiment in the upbuilding of the
kingdom of womanhood. It has not been
drained of wealth by a costly foreign policy.

To exchange the goddesses for womanhood
was not only what would seem a good form
of barter looked upon in any light, but it was
rendered more profitable to civilization by the
fact that the womanhood must be idealized in
order that the orators, poets and lovers could
pass from Diana to Mary, from a Juno to a
Beatrice. There must be some resemblance
between the old divine and the new human.
The Marys and Marthas were thus thrown
upward into a figure larger than the reality.
The New Testament so exalted the plane of
female life that it soon became very possible
to have in Rome or Florence human emblems
of a physical and moral beauty which had
always been supposed celestial. Olympus
was displaced by Florence.

It was in a climate full of the warmth of

nature, in an age of romance, in a time of

transition between the unreal and the real,

that the boy Dante met the girl of exceeding

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beauty. That she was the loveliest creature
of the times no one need deny. According
to Carlyle, each generation contains its love-
liest face as well as its worst book or meanest
man. By very slow degrees Dante wove
this loveliest face into his poems as a most
fitting motive. Not only did he wait for the
beauty to die and become an angel, but he
had patiently and silently passed over the
time and fact of her marriage. It was ten
years after her death and about fourteen
years after Dante's marriage to another
woman, that his poems began to appear in
the name of the infinite friendship.

It would thus seem that the poet in the
noon of his sad experience, driven by his
inward genius to hold up his generation to
the gaze of the people, selected this dead and
half -idolized beauty to be the motive of his
long symphony.

Dante did not bear patiently his banish-
ment. He made repeated attempts to get
back to his city with its beauty and precious
friendships, and at each failure his heart
became more melancholy and his fury more
flaming. The volume which slowly grew in
his mind was not a simple poem, not a love-
story. It was an encyclopedia of Italy.
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Dante

Italy had been in a political turmoil for the
several generations in which the two parties
struggled for supremacy — the papal power
and the temporal power — the former an
absolute throne, the latter a constitutional
monarchy. The papal party was founded
upon miracles, the limited monarchists upon
the history of Greek and Eoman law. The
struggle of those two ideas made Florence
and Rome battle-grounds not only for swords
but for words : and by the time Dante had
drunk in a heart full of political wrongs and
sorrows, he had in mind a large number of
persons who ought to be thought of as in
hell or purgatory, and his heart held a
memory of many noble ones who ought to
be dreamed of as in heaven.

The book was thus too great to be a love
story ; it was intended to be the history of a
period — a bar of judgment created as an out-
line of the final day of punishment and
reward. If any persons now living should
open the volume with the thought of finding
in it any love-making, any rapturous kisses
over proposal and acceptance, it is not in the
power or extent of this essay to express the
disappointment they will experience as they
read; but if any one loves to mark what
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political and religious ideas were moving
slowly across the Eleventh, Twelfth, and
Thirteenth Centuries, what silent formations
as cloud and storm were reaching up in
the sky, what rifts there were through
which shone the sun, what kind of political
leaders needed perdition, what kind of popes,
cardinals and bishops needed the limbo of
pain and regrets, what noble ideas had come
down from the classics, what nobler ones
from the simple truths of Palestine, what
lofty beings had risen up in every age, what
groupings of truths genius can make, what
lofty decorations the art of literature can
rear upon the thrilling or beautiful facts of
our race, and how poetry can draw the truest
portrait of history, to such a one the work
named " Dante " will seem not a tale of
romance but a vast stream of knowledge and
eloquence.

Dante was not a Beau Brummell, nor an
N. P. Willis. He was a heroic character,
ready to be a soldier or an ardent student of
Paris or Padua. He was once ruler in chief
of the Principality of Florence ; a citizen
king of the town that could grow such people
as Beatrice. He was no languishing lover.
He was rather a combination of part Pericles
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Dante

and part Homer. Beatrice was not a part
of Dante's life, so much as a part of his
literary art. In life, he loved her a little ;
in literature he loved her deeply.

Dante was the transition heart between
the old poetic epic and the new era of novels.
When the " Divine Comedy " was written,
no novel had ever been composed. Had this
Florentine lived six hundred years later, his
beautiful girl would have become a Mrs.
Kobert Ellsmere, and Dante's scorn would
have missed the Pope and smitten John
Calvin and modern Orthodoxy. But fortu-
nately for us, in the Thirteenth Century the
novel had not yet been invented.

What is a novel ? Literature in general is
that part of the world's thought that is
beautiful. The truth in the algebra or in the
grammar is real and useful, but it is not
beautiful. As music is not sound, but only
beautiful sound, as architecture is not the art
of building, but of building beautifully, so
literature is that thought or truth which
comes to us commended by ornament.
The novel is a book of truth or thought, or-
namented by the presence of an attractive
woman. As man has viewed and measured
his world, the most attractive object under
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The Message of David Swing

the wide heavens is woman. Man thinks
well of daisies and roses ; he approves of the
rainbow ; he cannot but speak kindly of the
ocean ; but his words grow the most eloquent
when he comes to speak about some woman
of great absolute or alleged beauty.

Bowing before this shrine, Homer asked a
Helen, a Briseis, a Penelope, to decorate his
long stories; Sophocles had impressed into
sweet duty the matchless Antigone ; Yirgil
had used Dido and Lavinia to act as colours
for all his fields and clouds. When in the
last lines of Yirgil, the dying Turnus says to
his rival : " Tua est Lavinia conjux," etc.,
" Lavinia is thy wife. Follow me no longer
with thy vengeance," those words were
prophetic of a day when a beautiful or frail
woman would ornament a million books
which should terminate each one in a wed-
ding or a funeral. But Dante was yet living
under the Greek and Latin administration.
As Homer had asked Penelope to wave per-
petually her flag of beauty, as Yirgil had
made Dido and Lavinia allure the world
along over his lines, so Dante knew perfectly
well that we should all pass more willingly
through Hell and Purgatory, and through
Heaven's gates, were we all aware that be-
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Dante

fore us ran or floated a half divine Beatrice.
When in mature life, this Italian leader and
statesman determined to write an epic of
Italy, he could not forget that a beautiful
womanhood had often been the musical
accompaniment of human reflections. Man-
hood has also stood for an ornament, but man
as such has never equalled woman in the
ability to create or furnish a fine art. Dante
marked how the Homeric verses had made
thoughts plead and fail or triumph around an
attractive Helen. Had not Penelope inspired
a poem of general travel and adventure?
Had not Dido and ^Eneas helped Yirgil to
make a continuity of beads of every size and
colour ? Beatrice was so matchless in beauty
and character, and had been so exalted by
the absence the grave had brought, and she
was so precious to Dante's personal memory,
that his lips must have said : " I will ask her
to cast a charm over my survey of the Italian
state. She will exalt the reader while she
exalts me. She shall be a standard of vir-
tues in comparison with which the blackness
of the age will remain undoubted. She will
gladly come back to me, for my misfortunes
will make all the scenes of my youth return,
and the past will fill a heart that no longer
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The Message of David Swing

possesses a future." Thus comes the book
to us, a song indeed, but also a history, a
philosophy, a sketch-book, an oration, a gal-
lery of pictures, a synopsis of the Thirteenth
Century.

Dante might well be called the first states-
man of the Christian period. He came in
advance of English and German letters, and
although the Magna Charta had been created
in England a few years before Dante was
born, one of the twenty Oxford colleges had
just been founded. It was a mere grammar
school in those days. London and Paris
were on the margin of that political light
which was still shining out from the classic
sun. Italy was nearer the centre. The
politics of the Greeks and Romans flowed
westwardly along with their languages, but
they had not gone much beyond Florence
when this great mind studied them.

In this continent when a great railway is
opening out westwardly, industry, wealth,
houses, streets, schools and churches spread
out fan-like around the terminus of the high-
way. When after some years pass the road
is carried a hundred miles onward, the local
congestion diminishes and the power passing
along the iron rail runs to another terminus
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Dante

and repeats there its fan-like opening. Thus
in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries the
vast Greek and Koman highway ended in
Florentine Principality, and as leaves and
blossoms grow where the vine is cut off, thus
a high politics threw out its leaves where the
Latin road ended or the Latin vine was
broken. Two parties arose, sometimes called
the Guelphs and Ghibellines, sometimes the
Whites and the Blacks. Called by what-
ever name, those two divisions were the same
old ones of all times. The Guelphs implied
the rule by constitutional law. Following
the example of nearly all great minds, Dante
espoused the broadest right and principle
and became the sturdy Eepublican of his
period. He argued for the separation of
Church from the State and won the fame of
orator before he won the fame of poet. He
antedated Count Cavour five hundred years,
and wrote down political maxims which are
now the practice of the whole Western world.
The treatise " De Monarchia " carried the
idea of constitutional politics so far that it
argued for a unity of all the states of Europe
with such home-rule here and there as a
change of circumstance should demand. The
monarchy Dante dreamed of differed little
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The Message of David Swing

from the England and America of to-day.
To meet this unity of States the same broad
thinker advocated a unity of language, and
showed how the fourteen dialects of Europe
were at bottom only one tongue. Of this
unity of law and language and race the
Papal absolutism was the one natural enemy.
Hence came the parties, Guelphs (Papal) and
Ghibellines (monarchical), hence the skir-
mishes and battles of centuries, hence the
slaughter of the Albigenses which came a
few years before the birth of the poet, hence
the slaughter and exiles of the Huguenots
long after, hence all the horrors which came
between.

It was Dante's attachment to the idea of
human unity that made him select Virgil
and Statius as dramatis personce in the poem
in which the Christian Beatrice was to be
the leading character. Such a grouping
came from the feeling that genius and mo-
rality make all times and persons to be one.
In Dante's visions Pagan and Christian move
along side by side. David was crowned
King of Israel while ^Eneas was landing in
Italy, and Christ came into the world at a
time when He could be aided by the reign
of Ca3sar Augustus. Plato, Socrates, Py-
250

Dante

thagoras and Cicero were the same in sub-
stance with the Fathers of the Church. In
the eternal world he saw Plato, the idealist,
and Aristotle, the realist, sitting down to-
gether in equal honour or imperfection.
Boethius, the philosopher, coming five hun-
dred years after Christ, joined with the
pages of Cicero in making Dante declare
that philosophy had become the mistress of
his soul. As Solomon had long before
painted Wisdom as an attractive woman who
took her place near the city gates and ut-
tered lessons to the passing throng, so Dante,
deeply coloured in all the profound thought
which lay between Plato and Boethius, de-
clared his Beatrice to be the living emblem
of that wisdom of the world :

" O lady, thou in whom my hopes have rest,
Who for my safety has not scorned, in hell
To leave the traces of thy footsteps marked,
For all mine eyes have seen, I to thy power
And goodness virtue owe and grace. Of slave
Thou hast to freedom brought me, and no means
For my deliverance hast left untried.
Thy liberal bounty still towards me keep
That when my spirit which thou madest whole
Is loosened from this body, it may find
Favour with thee. So I my plea preferred ;
And she so distant far, looked down,
Smiled once and towards the eternal fountain turned, ' '
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The Message of David Swing

The scene preliminary to this prayer seems
to take the poet away from the mere char-
acter of a lover and transform him into a
mind busy among the problems of Florence
and of society. Beatrice had vanished from
his side, and when he had cried out,
" Whither has she vanished ? " an aged man
appeared instead and replied that the loved
one had sent him to point out the higher
throne to which she had risen. So Dante
let eye run upward, throne above throne, and
there he beheld his idol high up among the
eternal truths and the infinite liberty. It is
not probable that Beatrice stood for any one
form of truth, that of religion or politics, but
for that philosophy which is the highest
form of truth and thought attainable in all
the departments of mental industry. She
was to Dante a living embodiment of what
our more abstract century has embodied in
the hymn " Nearer to Thee." Beatrice stood
for all height — political, ethical and religious.

With such internal reasons of being, this
poem began at once a career of influence.
It would not have created the Italian lan-
guage had it not possessed an internal great-
ness which clothed its melodious words with
power. Dante did not make a language by
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^Dante

joining the dictionary to mere poetic beauty ;
he was made more powerful by his having
the courage and the statesmanship that could
attach language and beauty to what was
greatest in civilization. That which com-
pelled one pope to forbid the reading of the
verses was the element in them which car-
ried them along. It was known that Dante
had declined in anger a permission to return
to Florence if he would return a penitent
and pay also a fine. He said he was not so
earthen-hearted as to go back like a truant
schoolboy or as a criminal. He must return
in honour or not at all. He could see the
sun and stars when outside the city, and
could ponder over sweet truth under any
sky. Thus the poem rested upon funda-
mental truths and the person of a hero.

To the dignity of its themes the work
adds all the confessed elements of true poetry.
The art is a high art. The natural style of
Dante is as full of surprises as that of Hugo.
It is intense and condensed. Often a word
or a phrase rings out like a trumpet or the
discharge of a heavy gun, and then follows
the tranquillity of a few lines. One of his
cantos begins thus :

" Broke the dead stillness of my brain a
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The Message of David Swing

crash of heavy thunder." He arose and
looked around. The reader is aroused along
with the writer. The thunder was the only
bell fit to awaken such a traveller in the
Inferno. No rap on the bedroom door, no
breakfast bell, would be adequate call for one
who is to advance a few paces and find men
and women in the regions of eternal grief.
A crash of heavy thunder was just the
awakening the traveller needed in that awful
gulf. When the fact or event needs the
softened speech of sympathy, the rude
sounds all cease, and the poem runs along
like the bird song in the "Siegfried" of
Wagner.

To the now living reader of Dante the
book has become only a treasure of detached
gems. So many persons in the work are so
unknown to us that but for humanity's sake
we should not care whether the poet had sent
them to heaven or hell. We cannot pass
judgment upon their doctrines or their con-
dition. It is necessary to leave many such
matters with the artist ; but at intervals all
through the long creation come episodes that
belong to the Nineteenth Century and Thir-
teenth alike. The continuity of the tale is
gone, but there is a lapful of pearls now off
254

Dante

their silken string. When Dante speaks of
a forest in spring time it is for our hearts he
speaks. The woods is the one through which
we have all walked in some happy day of
perhaps early life.

" Through that celestial forest whose thick shade
With living greenness the new coming day
Attempered, eager now to roam and search
Its limits round, forthwith I left the stream,
Through the wide woods leisurely my way
Pursuing o'er the ground which on all sides
Delicious odour breathed. A pleasant air
That intermitted never, never veered,
Smote on my temples — a mild wind
Of touch the softest, at which the boughs
Obedient all bent trembling towards that point
Where first the Holy Mountain casts its shade,
Yet were not so disordered but that still
Upon their top the feathered quiristers
Applied their wonted art, and with full joy
Welcomed those hours of prime, and warbled loud
Amid the leaves which to their happy notes
Keep tenour, just as from branch to branch
Along the piney forest, on the shore
Of Chassi rolls the gathering melody."

Dante knows just when silence is more

eloquent than speech. He detects those

moments when two or three words contain

more power than a hundred, but he also

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The Message of David Swing

knows of those places where speech is richer
than silence, and the man who upon one
page is as condensed as Tacitus becomes upon
the next page as full and free as Yirgil. He
is as mutable as water, which is capable of
acting either as dewdrop or as ocean.

His lessons as artist or painter, taken in
his youth, may have added to his love of
those pictures in which his verse abounds.
As a painter he opens many a canto which
he is to close as a philosopher :

" It hath been heretofore my chance to see
Horsemen with martial order shifting camp
To onset sallying or in muster ranged
Or in retreat sometimes outstretched for flight,
Light-armed squadrons and fleet foragers
Scouring thy plains, Arezzo, have I seen,
And clashing tournaments and telling jousts —
Now with the sound of trumpets, now of bells,
Drums or signals made from castled heights
And with inventions multiform, our own
Or introduced from foreign land."

The power of Dante to group details is
not less than that of those illustrious success-
ors which time brought, in Shakespeare and
Milton. When Beatrice stood watching, to
note on the horizon the chariot of Christ, she
became a type of such gentleness and affection
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Dante

that the poet could but liken her to a little
mother bird :

" Who midst a leafy bower
Has, in her nest, sat darkling through the night
With her dear brood, impatient to discern
Their looks again and to bring home their food,
In the fond search unconscious of all toil —
In the long meanwhile, on the boughs
That overhang the nest, with wakeful gaze
Watches for sunlight, nor till dawn
Removeth from the east her eager ken."

Here the " leafy bower," " the waiting in
darkness," " impatient for light to reveal the
hidden faces," the eagerness to bring home
food, "the unconsciousness of toil," the
" sitting towards the east " that she may de-
tect the light sooner, watching for day on
the leaves that overhang her nest, make up
that richness which belongs to the universe
of an Infinite Creator. The common mind
can allude to a bird upon the nest and can
join some humane associations for inculcat-
ing lessons of mercy to the wild boys of the
street, but a Dante alone can grasp the entire
scene and can make the soul of the little bird
stand for that great human race which in the
long night of earth watches for dawn, and
in the long shadows turns the face forever
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The Message of David Swing

towards the sunrise of a morrow. Dante's
style is all through that of a brocaded silk.
Five hundred years have separated us from
much in the poem that was once powerful
and beautiful, but enough remains to secure
for the work a place among the most won-
derful pieces in the literature of the entire
world.

What ought to add value to the poem is
the thought that it helped lead Europe out
of error and to create for it those waves of
light which soon began to roll after each
other over Germany, France and England.
The verses were perhaps most powerful in
the Fourteenth Century. They were recited
in the clubs and parlours of Italy and France,
and were sung in the streets. They were so
fall of sentiment, thought and rapture that
while they were laying the foundations of
political law they were inspiring all the arts,
and while they were the preludes of the
Reformation in religion and politics they
made Angelo and Eaphael appear in the
arena of beauty. These harmonious verses
differed from these of Anakreon which would
not sound anything but love. These Italian
lines not only sang love as Greek or Latin
sang' it, but they made liberty as eloquent

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Dante

as love, and leave us to wonder whether
Beatrice was not herself an emblem of that
Supreme Wisdom, all whose ways are pleas-
antness and peace.

259

xn

MAKTIN LUTHEK1

HEKE we are in the closing years of the
Nineteenth Century. Beyond doubt it
is the greatest Century ever lived by man-
kind. Some old periods were great in archi-
tecture, others in war, others in abstract
philosophy, others in an ascetic religion like
that of India, others in external magnificence
like those of Babylon and Carthage, but this
century contains all the valuable forms of
eminence which marked the past, and to
those forms of thought and sentiment it
adds its own unrivalled stores. Compared
with the present, old commerce and old phi-
losophy and old industry and old science and
old religion were only infants reaching out
childish hands to play. We find ourselves
on the banks of such a stream of intellectual
and moral power as never flowed through
the nations founded by the Pharaohs or con-
quered by Caesar or coveted by the early
popes.

1 Born November 10, 1483 ; died February 18, 1546.
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Martin Luther

We dare not boast, for little of this triumph
comes from us. As individuals we are only
witnesses at the spectacle, without being our-
selves the amazing scene. We are to add
our souls to the vast fact, but it did not come
from us. We are like the humble crowd
which received and welcomed Jesus. He was
greater than they. He arose in the far-off
mountains and porches of meditation and
study, and then moved down upon the com-
mon fields of Palestine. The crowd wel-
comed Him and afterwards became changed
into His likeness. Thus our modern glory
of politics and science and art and law and
benevolence has flowed down to us, and we
welcome it with many a hosanna, but instead
of being its whole cause we are blessed for-
ever if we are changed into its image. As
the thick soil is formed by the leaves and
grasses which fall upon the earth and dis-
solve into it, so the richness of our century
is the result of that human foliage which
budded and bloomed and perished long ago.
How long the human race has thus been liv-
ing and dying we know not, but it is possible
that we are twenty thousand years away
from the first prayers to God and from the
first tears that ever fell upon a grave. If
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The Message of David Swing

Newton, while thinking of the stars, felt that
he was only a child on the shores of a sea,
so may we, in looking back at the spectacle
of man, feel that we are only children stand-
ing by a measureless wave. Our hearts are
emptied of all egotism, and from boasting
we fall to praying for the privilege of help-
ing onward the advancing world.

The causes of this stream are back of us.
To enumerate them would be the study of
the entire history of man. They must be
passed by to make room for a single in-
fluence— that of some peculiar individual
man. Some single, rare mind of man or
woman appears upon the scene in this age
or that and causes a commotion of ideas by
its own momentum. It has not always been
a man. The names of Esther and Zenobia
and Koland and De Stae'l are enough to as-
sure us that had not man fettered and de-
graded woman, power would have been seen
in the whole past issuing from the lofty souls
of woman and man. From the nature of so-
ciety power has been developed in man, and
his has been the hand that has made and un-
made the most evil and the most good. If
woman has been denied power she has thus
escaped the charge of having brought so
262

Martin Luther

many nations to ruin. Man has touched all,
and has ruined much upon which his hand
has fallen. Babylon fell under his vices,
Rome under his sin and war. But at times
there has appeared a soul as full of mo-
mentum as an ocean wave. " Sons of God "
these are called in the rich poetry of the
Orient. "We, too, would thus speak of all
gifted ones had not our Northern zone car-
ried us away from that highly wrought,
emotional nature which traces quickly the
glory of the Deity and of human life. The
same parallels of latitude which separate us
from the aromas of the warm lands, from
the frankincense and myrrh, separate us also
from their affectionate language, and we
bury as a man one whom Arabia and Asia
would have lamented as a " Son of God."
To the power of climate and race to hush
the words of poetry, perhaps also machines
and inventions and discoveries are adding
their temptation to us to look to these for
help rather than to the individual soul. We
may be transferring our love over to steam
and electricity, and are yearly thinking less
of such a living soul as that which we call
Jesus, of Paul, or Savonarola, or Luther. If
so, it is our error and our loss, for the truth

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The Message of David Swing

is that our world does not tremble under the
pulsations of the engine so much as under
the beatings of the heart, the rumbling of
the locomotive being heard not half so far
as the footstep of a great man.

Luther repeated history by being born in
humble life. The wheels of youth rest or
rust in riches; in poverty they all run.
Wealth says, How shall I enjoy myself?
Poverty says, What labour shall I perform ?
Out of the former come those who play ;
out of the latter those who work. But this
scarcity of money must be joined to a great
degree of sensibility and culture inherited
from ancestors or found in the earliest sur-
roundings of youth. For if poverty alone
were able to make greatness the African
tribes and the Zulus should be supplying the
world with statesmen, and the mud huts of
New Mexico should be sending forth poetry.
That hardness of childhood that grows
mental force must be attached to an awak-
ened mind ; it must be a hardness like that
of Shakespeare and Franklin and Lincoln in
hearts surrounded by civilization. There are
women in India who have more sorrow than
fell to the lot of the Bronte sisters ; but in
India the suffering is not joined to a cultured
264

Martin Luther

brain. Thus it is hardship and civilization
combined that make the wheels of the brain
go. The infant Luther enjoyed such a two-
fold impulse. Christ was indeed born in a
manger, but that manger was carpeted with
all the wisdom of the East, and canopied by
the love of an enlightened mother, so that
while the little body of Jesus was near the
straw and hay His soul was where Greek
and Roman and Hebrew wisdom and taste
combined to make a new air. Thus Frank-
lin and Lincoln were born in poverty of
money but in the perfect splendour of liberty
and education and hope.

Luther was the son of a slate-digger and
cutter who had refinement enough to desire
to educate his little boy up to the highest
standard of the period. When the child was
only six months of age the parents moved to
where there could be found in a few years
the good of education. Thus the natural
power of the child enjoyed that advantage
found in the ambition of its father. If it
was not heir to gold, it was born to an es-
tate of parental solicitude and ambition.
Much of German eminence among men had
come from the devotion of father and mother
to the care of each child. As each Hebrew
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The Message of David Swing

mother had a remote suspicion that perhaps
her boy was to be the saviour of Israel, so
each German parent easily reached the con-
clusion that the nation had long been wait-
ing for his son to appear ; and so far as
lay in their power the German fathers
and mothers urged their offspring onward
towards a dreamed-of destiny. Stilling and
Mozart and Beethoven and Goethe were not
only born to great powers, but also were
whipped to success by their fathers. All
complain of the pitiless cruelty of their early
surroundings. Stilling's father whipped him
almost daily. To common cruelty the father
of Beethoven added drunkenness ; but yet so
anxious was he that his son should become
an extraordinary musician that he falsified
regarding the child's age that he might seem
the more a prodigy. In keeping with this
record Luther came to the task of life miser-
ably flogged all through his first ten years.
And what omission of the birchen switch
may have occurred at home was fully atoned
for by the zeal of the village schoolmaster,
and between the home and the schoolhouse
no lesson of duty or piety remained free from
this barbarous mode of enforcement.
In mature life Luther looked back with
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Martin Luther

something of sorrow upon such treatment —
sorrow for himself and sorrow for the mis-
takes of those whom he deeply loved. He
wrote : " My parents treated me so cruelly
that I became timid. They felt that they
were sincerely right, but they had no dis-
cernment of character that would have en-
abled them to know when and upon whom
and how punishment should be inflicted."
While our times have no sympathy with this
brutality it cannot but look with approval
and delight upon the parental care and am-
bition which encompassed all these great
children in their old German homes. In
framing an explanation of many of the lead-
ing men of the whole past we must find a
part of the causes of things to rest in the
culture and ambition of the father and
mother. Cicero's father moved to Rome
that he might educate his boy. Augustine's
mother cared for her child with an infinite
enthusiasm until he had reached almost
middle life. She lived for him alone.

Thus out of a poor home as to money, but
out of a good home as to judgment and am-
bition and piety, came upward the mind
which was to turn the stream of the Western
thought and life. In imagination we can
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The Message of David Swing

picture this youth of fourteen leaving his
home that he might attend a school that
should prepare him for the university. He
performed the journey on foot and carried in
a knapsack all his worldly possessions. Rude
as his home had been, the scene before him
was so dreary that it made the cottage be-
hind him seem an enchanted ground ; and as
he moved away from the charm of the one
and towards the hardship of the other the
tears rolled down his cheeks. Once located
at the school he sang songs under the win-
dows of the rich and supported himself by
what small coins fell at his feet. He per-
formed this musical circuit thrice each week.
At last his voice, rich in itself, but made
more touching by his poverty, won the sym-
pathy of a woman of wealth, and out of
these songs under a window came a woman's
kindness, which paid for four years of edu-
cation in that school and for a home in the
house won by his music. You can recall the
picture. A boy singing in front of the
quaint house of Dame Ursula Cotta. A
kind face comes to the window and looks
and listens. Weeks and months pass and by
degrees the dame begins to wish that the
little Martin Luther would come again.
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Martin Luther

Each week the coins the kind hand tosses out
increase in size or in number. At last the
woman talks with the boy, and hears the
simple story of his struggles and hopes. She
at last says : " Well, you need not sing for
money any more. I shall help thee on-
ward."

It must be a matter of conjecture what
were the songs he thus offered along the
streets. The Minnesingers who went from
place to place with their love-songs died
away in the Fourteenth Century. The Six-
teenth Century was in the outset religious in
Germany. Michelet says Luther inherited
poverty and piety. But after all is said re-
garding the religious drift and even supersti-
tion of the times, there remained much
margin in mind and heart to be filled up
with the common songs of sentiment and
passion. As mankind never becomes too
pious to fall in love, it is not probable that
any age ever passed which sang only hymns
in the streets. Luther may have offered
some religious piece at some appropriate
lattice, but when the face half visible showed
features of beauty and youth the sentimental
music of the universal heart must have
brought him the most money. This Martin
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The Message of David Swing

played well on the guitar, but his voice needed
no accompaniment.

Mark the quality of his studies in these
formative years, — grammar, rhetoric, poetry
and music. Upon such a course our age has
not made much improvement. Our period
offers more facts — those of science and
history — but it offers less of inspiration.
Facts are a poor substitute with the young
mind for rhetoric and poetry because these
are the wings of the soul, whereas facts can
be acquired and retained by a man without
a soul. Either method is in itself defective.
A perfect course would be that which should
combine the acquisition of knowledge with
the highest development of language and
rhetoric and the imagination. It was the
good fortune of this German youth, and of
the world through him, that he became
strong in music and poetry and language,
for these helped him to rise to an enthusiasm
which was able to burn like an eternal fire.
When the times needed impetuosity Luther
became impetuous ; when inspiration was
asked for this man became inspired. Yast
learning would have quieted that heart which
was needed not as a library, but as a burning
torch.

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Martin Luther

Towards such a restless zeal these studies
all pointed. Poetry underlies more heroism
than learning alone can boast. It, only, rises
above the common things of the shop and
market-place, and perceives the immensity of
human and divine affairs. The heart, which
could proceed to the city of Worms to meet
perhaps death, was the heart which could, the
day before the journey began, compose the
words and the music of a hymn that seemed
fully able to sustain its author. The poet
was the hero.

" A tower safe our God is still ;
A trusty shield and weapon ;
He'll help us clear from all the ill
That hath us overtaken."

Thirty-six such lines as these sung in the
outset and chanted in the choir of the soul
were the band of music for that march of one
man against the potentates of the age. His
prose was all ornamented, like a wall covered
with vines. Speaking of a tree laden with
ripe fruit, he said : " Had Adam not sinned,
we should have seen the beauty of these
things ; every bush and shrub would have
seemed more lovely than though it were
made of gold and silver. It is really more
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The Message of David Swing

lovely, but we are stupid as beasts. God's
power and wisdom are shown in the smallest
flowers. Painters cannot rival their colour,
nor perfumers their sweetness ; green, yellow,
crimson, blue and purple— all growing out of
one earth. We trample upon the lilies as
though we were so many cows."

Poetry is not in itself a divine power, for
Cowper and Wordsworth could not have led
in a revolution. Neither could Yirgil. But
when the poetic sentiment is joined to a
great soul it becomes an irrepressible impulse.
It does not sit down and write verses, but it
detects the joys and griefs, the rights and
wrongs of the people, and weeps and hopes
while mere learning reads or sleeps. Like
Dante and Angelo and Milton, Luther had
power as well as fancy. His success as a
student was very great. He surprised his
instructors. He was quick and strong in
debate, original, full of vivacity, rich in the
German language, and was perhaps the
first great orator to venture forth upon
philosophical debate in the tongue of the
people. He was a Latin scholar by the time
he was twenty, but he preferred the German ;
he brought forward a revolution in speech
before he led in religion, and from him came
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Martin Luther

the dialect of Schiller and Goethe and Jean
Paul Bichter !

It was the design of the young man to
study law. It is singular that neither Luther's
father nor Yalcin's held theology or the
priesthood in much esteem. Each father was
heart-broken over the religious drift of his
son. A comment this, not upon the piety of
the fathers, for they were deeply devout, but
upon the condition of the clergy in those
days. The vices of the age had made their
black mark upon many of the monastics.
Many monks who were not dissolute were
simply lazy beggars. Luther, with all his
lofty powers, was to take the path of the law.
It offered some honour and some industry
and money, and much less hypocrisy.
Towards this the father pointed, and towards
it the son turned his face.

For the law the youth at last had no heart.
Pure and innocent himself, Luther saw the
Church through a clear, divine air. Its music
charmed him. And, moreover^ there often
come to young hearts melancholy years. It
would seem that early life should produce
nothing but smiles and laughter. Youth is
thus pictured by painter and poet, and in
general it is full of joy or peace ; but for
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The Message of David Swing

some unknown cause Nature inserts a mel-
ancholy year between ten and twenty-five.
Tears come easily. The heart is morbidly
sensitive. It writes farewell notes to friends.
The soul loves to creep into its corner and
distrust the voice of love. A few hearts
thus in life's sweet morning wholly break,
and suicide ends the scene. The wave of
sadness rose high around this gifted youth.
The storm may have come from injured
health, but more probably it came from un-
seen recesses in the spirit. No path of duty
seemed clearly defined. But as he walked
in a field with a fellow student a bolt of
lightning killed the companion in an instant,
and left Luther still in the world. Full of
superstition the astounded youth fell on his
knees and vowed all his powers to God. He
entered a convent, and thus began the Eef-
ormation. It was kindled by a flash of
lightning.

A fact must be mentioned here which will
betray at once the need of an overthrow of
the past. The cup of folly was full. The
people had been long enough fed upon the
marvellous stories of ascetics and idlers and
miracle-mongers. Luther went into the con-
vent taking with him two books, the only
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Martin Luther

books, perhaps, he possessed. "What were
they? Were they the Testaments full of
the simple godlike life of Jesus and of the
labours and teachings and glories of St. Paul
and St. John and the lofty strains of Job and
David and Isaiah ? Oh, no ! This educated
youth of the Sixteenth Century took into the
convent with him Yirgil and Plautus ! The
secret of the Keformation is out. Luther
had been reared to manhood in the church
without ever having seen the Bible. It was
almost a lost volume. Where existing, it
was in a foreign tongue. Custom of the
monks had become the standard of morals
and the basis of all doctrine.

Yirgil and Plautus were pleasant books,
but not adequate to the production of a civ-
ilization. ^Eneas and Dido figured largely
in the oddities of St. Augustine while he was
in pagan clouds. But, as it was, Luther took
into the convent too much logic and rhetoric
and fervour, for the most aged monks in the
monastery soon became alarmed at the life
and wisdom and force of the new comrade,
and they held a secret meeting to determine
how to check the unsaintly manners of the
young devotee. A venerable ecclesiastic
declared such a love of books to be sinful,
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The Message of David Swing

that it elevated too much the individual
mind when it ought to sit prostrate, meekly
submissive to the high dispensation of the
superiors ! Luther was condemned to be the
man-of-all-work for the convent, and for
three years he swung the broom, carried the
wood, scrubbed the stairs, and then with
the company of a pack-mule, he begged food
from door to door. " This," said the rev-
erend theologians, " will break his spirit of
self-importance."

In their prophecy they were mistaken, for
the same mind which had combined drudgery
and study in boyhood could do so again in
mature life. The stream of Luther's piety
and logic and study ran straight on, his
hours with the pack-mule being hours of
meditation, and more valuable than hours
with the monks. In his mind the truths of
religion gradually fell into a shape quite
different from the forms and customs which
had come down from the dark ages.

All gifts of learning and genius would
have been vain had not Luther possessed
piety. His soul was sincerely religious. God
and Jesus Christ were loved, and lived for,
and trusted. Christianity was not a form,
but it was his joy and his hope. In fervour
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Martin Luther

he was more like Mme. Guyon and Fenelon
to come after him than like those who had
passed before him. His hymns were not
full of theology but of affection :

Thou strong defense, Thou Holy Light,
Teach us to know our God aright,
And call Him Father from the heart ;
The Word of Life and Truth impart
That we may love not doctrines strange,
Nor e'er to other teachers range,
But Jesus for our Master own
And put our trust in Him alone.
Hallelujah, Hallelujah !

Thou sacred Ardour, Comfort Sweet,
Help us to wait with ready feet
And willing heart at Thy command,
Nor trial fright us from Thy band.
Lord, make us ready with Thy power —
Strengthen the flesh in weaker hour,
That as good warriors we may force
Through life and death to Thee our course.
Hallelujah, Hallelujah !

Such was the personal approach of Luther
towards an unseen but vast work. His
learning, his natural power, his honesty, his
fervour, his stubborn will and his unequalled
courage fitted him to be a leader from dark-
ness to light. He was one of those whose
life shines in history like a sun in the sky.
277

XIII
VICTOK HUGO '

IT is common to look upon France as the
home of atheism. But such an estimate
of the condition of faith in that country is
far from being true. Of the 36,000,000 of
the French population 34,000,000 are Roman
Catholics ; a little over 1,000,000 are Protes-
tants, thus leaving 1,000,000 within which all
the forms of anti-religious sentiment are to
enact their various parts. In a census taken
a few years ago only 85,000 persons were
recorded as having no belief or an anti-Chris-
tian belief. Thus out of 36,000,000 only one
person in 4,000 is to be quoted as indifferent
or opposed to the forms and ideas of religion.
From the common fame about France, with
the history of the Revolution and Reign of
Terror and Commune, we have all felt that
this was the one godless nation of Europe.
Against this common fame we are met by
the fact that of the population of France

1Born February 26, 1802 ; died May 22, 1885.
2/8

Victor Hugo

more than ninety-nine per cent, are Chris-
tians.

But this surprising fact will not explain all
and contradict all, because we must remember
that the world is not governed by majorities,
not even by so large a majority as ninety-nine
per centum. France has, in one instance, been
atheistic for a brief period, but it was such
by a coup d'etat. In that method of seizing
an empire sometimes a thousand brave men
will equal a million citizens. For the most
part Paris has been France ; just as the city
of Mexico has always been the whole nation.
At a recent Mexican election of high officials
not one man in ten took the trouble to go to
the polls to vote. The voting was all done
by a few thousands who had some individual
interests in the result. Thus in France, Paris
has generally attended to all the political
business ; and thus a group of a million and a
half has really stood for the entire mass of
thirty-six millions.

Of the enormous religious population
thirty-five millions are Koman Catholics,
and the tendency of that church has always
been to sink the individuality of the man, to
make the common millions full of timidity
and obsequiousness, and to concentrate in
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The Message of David Swing

ecclesiastical potentates what personal hero-
ism the Church could produce. We have in
France the most decidedly Koman Catholic
country in the world; the one empire to
which the Pope has always looked for sup-
port, Spain not being excepted. But in
battling against rationalism and what little
atheism there existed, these ecclesiastical
millions could do but little. At any time of
the Revolution Paris contained only a little
more than half a million of inhabitants.
Thus the enormous throng of nominal Chris-
tians was spread out in a nation whose
domain was 600 miles long by 400 miles
wide. Furthermore, of this religious popula-
tion about one-third of those over six years
of age could not read or write. As there
were no railways or telegraphs it is almost
certain that the changes of political situations
lay in the hands of the great central city and
a half score of large towns.

Thus it came to pass that the few atheists
who finally figured in the Revolution were
concentrated in Paris, and were men of great
daring because they were the children of the
new thought and new mental power which
at the same time had made our Paine and
Franklin and the great deists of Europe,

Victor Hugo

The French Eevolution did not come from
irreligion, but from the most awful and long-
continued oppression and criminality of the
throne. The Koman Catholics hated the
Government with a hatred based upon rob-
bery and starvation. A terrible famine had
made many thousands of beggars take refuge
in Paris, and when the States General was
called to attempt to secure some rights for
the people these were in the city ready for
anything that might offer hope of a change,
for a change could not be for the worse. In
the States General elected, the first class
contained 291 clergymen, in the third class
there were nearly 500 of the better members
of the people. It was in the chaos which
came along slowly that a few atheists got
possession of the reins of power. Even this
group was divided, for Eobespierre declared
himself against Danton and avowed himself
as eager to set up a government which should
confess God and the immortality of the soul.
Foreign nations were making use of the sor-
rows of France to invade her territory, and
in the midst of such a babel some brilliant
atheists passed into power. But this reign
was of short duration. This godless party
became the disgust of the millions of Koman-
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The Message of David Swing

ists and Protestants. The atheists were to
erase the history of the world, and they or-
dered a new chronology to begin. They
were to date letters and documents with the
year "1." Having ample power thus to
name their first year they had no method of
establishing a succession, and year " 1 " never
advanced to year " 2."

These statements seem necessary to re-
mind us that Victor Hugo was not the prod-
uct of an atheistic nation, because there was
or is no such a nation ; but rather was he the
true child of that great rationalism which
began to purify the air in the Christian
Pascal and the deist Yoltaire. The Roman
Church would not open to admit a new truth
or to reject an old error. The great mass of
religious barnacles the holy ship had culti-
vated and carried along in the Dark Ages it
attempted to carry along through the Seven-
teenth and Eeighteenth Centuries. It denied
they were barnacles, and called them pearls.
There was no progress of knowledge possible
in that denomination. This fact made neces-
sary a belief that should be not only outside
of the Church, but even full of wit and re-
sistless logic against that venerable organism.

The Protestant forms of Christianity had
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Victor Hugo

been less hostile to reason, but they had a
horror of the hearts of the children of the
Pope. An outside religion thus became
necessary unless men would consent to dis-
pense with the use of reason. This was so
large a price to pay that minds by nature re-
ligious were compelled to live and die with
a faith partly beautiful but partly injured by
neglect and lifelong argument. Some few,
like Lamartine, stood with one foot on the
old altar, but these were detained there more
by the French romance than by any regard
for the moss-covered human theology. The
sentiments detained many to whom the
reason was pointing a different road.

"What a brilliant group was this ! Mme.
De Stael and Napoleon were in it. There
stood also Yictor Cousin, who perhaps more
than any man of our century helped turn
the young generations of France away from
the philosophy of atheism and towards that
of God. He was imprisoned for a short
time by the influence of the priesthood, but
he came forth to stand wholly outside the
earthly churches, yet evidently wholly inside
of the church of the heavenly Father. Un-
der his touch religion became founded upon
the deepest reason, and was seen as the ab-

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The Message of David Swing

solute fountain of human greatness. He
was a pupil of the Eoyer-Collard, who spent
his life in a high philosophy drawn from all
the noble minds, from Keid of Scotland back
to Plato of the Greeks. Time would fail us
to mark those great names which were com-
pelled, passing life in France, to cherish their
religious sentiments out in that open air
where the spirit of reason could associate
with the spirit of worship, and where man
could be true to his God without being false
to himself.

In the midst of this large class, but more
grand than numerous, stood Victor Hugo in
his long life, and now in his grave he sleeps
with them. He was the ripe fruit of that
Voltairism which could not call folly by the
name of inspiration, nor a career of sins and
errors by the name of infallibility ; but to the
strength of Voltaire he added the rich poetry
of Lamartine, and thus he contained the vir-
tues of two great intellects. He bids us re-
member that France produces two kinds of
human beings : the luxuriant animal and the
luxuriant soul — men who will deny the being
of a God and live for only the object of
transient sense ; and men who will place be-
fore us a religion full of fervour and colour-
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Victor Hugo

ing, a religion as rich as the many-tinted
window of a cathedral, when seen while the
highest music is sounding a vesper for the
heart. French religion, when it has come
to us through some of its noblest minds,
has come in a most impressive form, having
in it much of that delicacy and ornament
which distinguishes the French mind from
the mind that speaks and argues under more
northern skies. Chateaubriand, although a
Romanist, was so modernized by the re-
flex influence of the Rationalists, that his
" Genius of Christianity " came to the
world more like a lofty poem than like a
treatise from a theologian. His wide read-
ing, his travels in all lands, his dreamings in
the forests of America, when General Wash-
ington became his friend, his poetic medita-
tions in the land of Christ and the apostles,
his poems — " Atala " and " Rene " — his nov-
els, betrayed and created an eloquence which
made Christianity repose upon the day of un-
belief like the rainbow upon black clouds.
The general truths of religion came from his
hand as beautiful and pure as the marbles
from the sculptor's studio. The civilized
world had never before seen the height and
depth of the sentiment of God, the Son of
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The Message of David Swing

God, and immortal life. He had been a
rationalist, and almost a free-thinker, but he
returned to the established Romanism as
being the best hope of humanity.

In looking at these forerunners of Hugo,
we must not omit the name of Larnennais.
He, too, was one of the eloquent souls for
which French religion has been very remark-
able. Lamennais remained in the mother
church until he had reached his forty-sixth
year. But in the later of those years, he had
with so much power advocated liberty of re-
ligion, freedom of speech, that when he an-
nounced his withdrawal from Rome he had
not far to go. The volume he published at
the time went through a hundred editions
before its grand style and language sank into
silence. It was the song of the new world.

These names will serve to remind us that
France is not atheistic ; but she has come to
that condition of education and liberty which
makes her greatest minds prefer to stand
outside of the Church and perhaps aloof from
the public religion. The Roman Church in
its refusal to learn the truth has become a
sanctuary whose doors open outward, that
those in may escape. It reverses in France
the gospel imagery of a feast to which the
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Victor Hugo

multitude were urged to come in ; here this
feast is seen and known to be over, and the
honourable guests are compelled to retire.
Many who remain within, priest and people,
are in full sympathy with the rationalism
and republicanism on the outside. When
Lamennais advocated liberty and equality
the lower clergy were on his side ; the higher
ecclesiastics were the ones to oppose his
liberal views. Even now when riots and
barricades are prevalent in Paris, the men
of no religion are found side by side with
those who are nominal followers of Christ,
all these meeting on the common ground of
hunger, nakedness, and injustice.

Victor Hugo comes up before us with the
same ardent belief in God which has marked
many of the greatest men of France. He is
seen standing for a great transition period in
which old Eomanism and old Calvinism are
dying, and something better is being elabo-
rated in the mind and heart of the new epoch.
Although his mind was set to romance and
poetry like that of Lamartine, he possessed
more of unbridled power, and what he ut-
tered regarding God added to the sweetness
of the poetic the roll of thunder. His short
and sharp sentences fell not like an argument
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The Message of David Swing

but like the sentence of a final judgment.
When the Deity was introduced in novel or
drama or speech no apologies were made for
His entrance. He came in like a king. No
modern writer made so little use of miti-
gating terms. The terms " perad venture,"
" perhaps," " presume," " suppose " were sel-
dom asked to perform any service. Water-
loo was lost "because of God"; Napoleon
" vexed God " ; " the shadow of an enormous
right hand rested upon Waterloo " ; " God
passed over it." In the last words of Jean
Yaljean this Supreme Ruler enters the scene
beautifully, but with no modifying particles
of doubt or contingency. " Such are the dis-
tributions of God. He is on high. He sees
us all, and knows what He is doing among
the great stars."

That individuality which made this great
man seem an egotist clothed him with power
when amid the world-wide themes of action
and opinion. He seldom came to a contem-
plation of himself, and hence his egotism
consumes but few sentences in his mass of
written thought. He should be forgiven,
because the mental quality which was some-
times egotistic was in most hours the move-
ment of a powerful will and an open heart
288

Victor Hugo

incapable of concealment. He made him-
self visible only at rare intervals, compared
with his grand public presentation of hu-
manity and the fact and presence of God.
In one of his novels the world's miserable
stand forth in such visible and lovable and
beseeching attitude that the living and ad-
vancing race will not soon lose sight again
of the unhappy. He was a painter greater
than those who have covered canvas with
their conceptions, for while Parrhasius could
not paint a groan, the art of Victor Hugo
was fully equal to that task. His language
caught up the troubles of the multitude and
made this groan sound in the two hemi-
spheres— a pathetic and solemn tone struck
from a loud-sounding harp. He also could
paint the gladness of the soul, but no mu-
sician, no sculptor, no architect, no painter,
could say of human happiness what Hugo
said : " Our joys are shaded. The perfect
smile belongs to God alone."

In this transition period, while pulpit and
church were seeking better definitions of
their old terms, and asking Whence came
man — from a Creator, or from inanimate
causes, and by what path ? Hugo was busy
with the actual world applying the ideas of
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The Message of David Swing

Jesus on behalf of the orphans and widows —
" those formidable pleaders " — made by the
armed Napoleons, on behalf of black slave
and white, the oppressed of the whole world.
What a poet was he compared with the Greek
Anacreon ! For this sensual Pagan said,
his forehead crowned with leaves and his
harp in his hand, " Farewell all truth, phi-
losophy, and heroes ; I shall sing only of
love." But the modern poet said : " I will
forget love, family, childhood, song, and
leisure that I may sing for the welfare of
the oppressed." Beyond doubt his fifty
years of sympathetic opinion and eloquent
speech have entered into the better laws and
kinder philanthropy of the century.

We are thankful for the more symmetrical
men of the times, for the calmer poets, the
more careful philosophers, the men of pro-
found learning and of childlike modesty,
thankful for those minds which lead us in-
side the sanctuary and whose prayers and
hymns keep up the never dying flame upon
the altar, thankful for the great good done
by the Calvinists and the Komanists, and to
all those flowing tides of gratitude we may
add a feeling of gladness that such a man as
this Yictor came such as he was and passed
290

Victor Hugo

along through our century by the pathway
now marked by his footsteps. His intense
manner aroused a sleeping myriad. His
funeral in France attended in some manner
by a million persons tells us how his writings
and presence have affected that vast multi-
tude that knows the sorrow of poverty, the
cruelty of despotism, and the sweet of lib-
erty and equality. In that great moment
the Pantheon was secularized that so great a
friend of mankind might rest in a great
tomb. Instead of being secularized it was
rather made more religious by receiving
within its walls that forehead that was fur-
rowed by frowns against wrong, those lips
that had long been eloquent over the being
of God.

In his prophecy and sublime prose-poem
upon God, Ezekiel many times addresses the
son of man to urge him to mark and adore
that Divine Providence from whom came
the mystery of life. " Son of man " is a
phrase that stands for the average power and
nobleness of human nature. It points out
man in his youth, in his romance, reverence,
love, ambition, vivacity, logic, and hope.
Infancy with its weakness has passed away,
age with its decline has not come. Christ
291

The Message of David Swing

took this title as a part of His honour, but
He was also the son of God. Looking into
our period we can detect here and there the
"sons of men." Victor Hugo was one of
these. He was the son of our century — a
full expression of the science, reason, art,
benevolence, and broad religion that have
taken deep root in its rich soil ; he was the
full expression of the millions who are weep-
ing their way along as they journey from
poverty's cradle to poverty's grave ; he was
the son of the rationalism of Europe which
has filled the era with great minds able to
live great lives ; he was the son of America
in his devotion to a universal liberty and
equality, a man reared upon the truths which
made all those statesmen who are dear to
hearts this side the sea; he was a son of
France in his passionate imagery, fancy, and
in his matchless language ; a son of religion,
too, for going out of the doors of the old
Church he did it to enter at once the holier
Temple of the Almighty. As some one has
said, "He turned his back to the Church
that he might turn his face to God."

With history full of such names, with the
air full of gratitude for such lives and full
of lamentation for such graves, with these
292

Victor Hugo

pictures before them of colossal minds ex-
tracting happiness and power from a divine
faith, the young men of our day should feel
that atheism possesses no intellectual charm ;
that religion in its essence is a height to
which even genius may be glad to climb.

The Atheists recently attempted to hold a
general meeting. It was to be in Home, that
it might seem more like a triumph of a proud
reason over a superstitious faith. But it
failed. Not a single delegate from all Eng-
land was present— few from any point.
There is not that in atheism that can inspire
the heart. Men have made long pilgrimages,
have journeyed in hunger and storm, but
this travel has never been towards an empty
life and the death of a brute, but always
towards a God or the tomb of Him who
said, " I am the resurrection and the life."
God is the life of the heart.

May our century rear out of its measure-
less resources more great natures like that of
Yictor Hugo ; men who will make humanity
sound forth in grand music, and who, with
an inspired mantle, will smite the stream of
atheism until its waters shall part and open
up for our millions of youth an easy pathway
between their souls and God !
293

Index

ADAM'S sin, 129
Adamses, the, 95
Addison, Joseph, 65
/Esop, 45
Anacreon, 290
Anarchistic Americans, 192
Antonius, Marcus, 215, 228,

230, 240
Apelles, 93
Archbishops of Canterbury

and Westminster, 1 86
Arethusa, 119
Aristotle, 251
Arnold, Benedict, 39, 67
Aspasia, 240
Athens, 93, 164
Atticus, Crassus, 208, 215
Augsean stables, 232
Augustine, 267
Aurelius, Marcus, 45

BABYLON, 263

Bacon, Lord, quoted, 1 1

Bancroft, George, 27

Barrows, John H., 21

Beatrice, a poetical memory
to Dante, 236; meets
Dante, 241 ; why se-
lected, 246-247 ; romantic
ideal of highest things,
252

Beauty in life and teaching,
16-17

Beecher, Henry Ward, 12,
13, 15, Chapter VI, 124-

13% ; greatest years of,
1845-1865; made an
American politics and an
American religion, 127 ;
hated scholastic theology,
130 ; eloquence of, made
history, 131 ; corruptions
of slavery, 132 ; great
work of, 134-137; g°ne
with other champions of
freedom, 138

Beecher, Lyman, 126-129

Beethoven, 265

Bellus homo, 216

Boethius, 251

British army in Philadel-
phia, 58

Broad church, 156

Bronte Sisters, 264

Brooks, Phillips, 10, 13,
Chapter VII, 139-158;
title Bishop lost in, 139 ;
" great commoner " of re-
ligion, 141 ; great men of
Episcopacy, 143 ; longed
for Christian unity and
equality, 150-152 ; elo-
quence of, 152-154; les-
sons for all churchmen in,
155 ; reason will trans-
form all churches, 157-

158

Browning, Elizabeth B., 239
Browning, Robert, 239
Bruce, Heart of the, 28

294

Index

Brutus, Decimus, 215
Brutus, Marcus, 210, 215,

227

Buchanan, James, 60
Bunyan, John, 90
Burke, Edmund, 65, 140
Burr, Aaron, 67

CAESAR, AUGUSTUS, 250

Caesar, Julius, 210, 212, 214,
220 ; death of, 225-227 ;
referred to, 260

Caesar, Octavius, 228

Carlyle, Thomas, 242

Casca, 215, 227

Castelar, 49

Cato, 210, 215

Cavour, 49

Channing, Wm. E., IOI, 103

Charles I, 85

Chase, Salmon P., 107

Chateaubriand, 285

Cheever, Dr. George, 132

Choate, Rufus, 27

Christ and Augustus, 250

Christian ideas — peace, lib-
erty, and equality — illus-
trated by Sumner, 96

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 94,
99, 119, 121 ; slave and
librarian of, 200 ; let-
ters from, 201, 202; de-
scription of, 203-204 ;
villas of, 204-209 ; as
scholar, 209 ; home fun
of, 210-212; as orator,
213; moderate life of,
221 ; grief of at Tullia's
death, 224 ; flight and
death of, 228-230; re-
ferred to, 251, 267

Cicero, Marcus (son of or-
ator), 218

Cicero, Quintus, 215
Cimber, Tullius, 226
Clay, Henry, 20, 36, 69, 76,

95» I3i

Cleopatra, 240
Cleveland, Grover, 176, 178
Cole, J. R., 173
Coleridge, S. T., 131
Confucius, 93
Cornelia, 216
Cornwallis' surrender, 54
Cotta, Dame Ursula, 268
Cousin, Victor, 283
Cromwell, Oliver, 1 14
Cross, Sir Robert, 186
Curtis, George Wm., 14

DANTE, n, 23, 38. 04, 108,

114, IS1

Dante, Chapter XI, 232-
259 ; myths as illustra-
tions, 232-235 ; Beatrice
a poetical memory to, 236-
237 ; writes Inferno in
Latin, love-poem Para-
diso in Italian, 238 ;
woman in classic and me-
diaeval times, 239-241 ;
Beatrice met, 241 ; ban-
ishment of Dante, 242 ;
Paradiso history of a pe-
riod, 243-244 ; fiction,
245 ; why Beatrice ? 246-
247 ; Europe in Thirteenth
Century, 248; Guelphs
and Ghibellines, 249 ; in-
fluence of Paradiso — he-
roic author, high art, 252-
253 ; examples of beauty,
254-257 ; value of the
poem, 258-260

Danton, 282

Dartmouth College, 132

295

Index

Darwinians, theory of, 35
David and ^Eneas, 250
Decoration Day, Chapter
VIII, 159-175; reasons
for, 159-160; honourable
wars of United States,
161 ; sorrows of the war,
161-163; peace commis-
sion and Lincoln, 163-
164 ; slavery and war,
165 ; flowers for triumph
of right, 166-167 ; injus-
tice to Negro, 169-171;
national harmony, 172-

'75
DC Monarchia, modernness

of, 249

Demosthenes, 115, 119
De Soto, 63

De Stael, Madame, 262, 283
De Tocqueville, 119
Dido and Lavinia, 246
Douglas, Stephen A., 60
Douglass, Frederick, no
Duty of the Pulpit to Social
Unrest, Chapter IX, 176-
196 ; labour and capital
at odds, 176; the strike,
178; pulpit near the peo-
ple, 1 80; labour unions,
180-187 ; American an-
archists, 192 ; theological
preaching worthless, 193-
194 ; pulpit must teach
for to-day's needs, 195-
196

EAST INDIA COMPANY, 69
Egeria, 241
Eloquence, 153-154
Emerson, R. W., 15, 115
Epictetus, 44
Esther, Queen, 262

Everett, Edward, 115
Ezekiel, 291

FAUST, 234

February, 37

Fenelon, 145

Florence, n

Formian villa, the, 202

France, 47 ; religion of,

278-284
Franklin, Benjamin, 39,

162, 185, 264, 280
Furman, Rev. Dr., 134

GARFIELD, JAMES A., 20,
Chapter III, 72-87;
death and character of,
74-75 ; humble start, 76-
77 ; greatness of, 78 ; uni-
versally mourned, 80-81 ;
religion of, 82-83 ; Amer-
ican history rich in men,
84-85 ; Lincoln and, 86 ;
lesson of mortality, 87

Garrison, Wm. L., 12, 60,
107

Gladstone, Wm. E^ 22, 27

Goethe, 234

Grant, Ulysses S., 136

Greece, 119

Greeley, Horace, 107

HALLAM, HENRY, 239

Hamilton, Alexander, 65

Hamilton, Sir Wm., 238

Harcourt, Sir Wm., 186

Harpies, 234

Hayes, Rutherford B., 169

Henry, Patrick, 69

Hercules, 232

Herrennius, 230

High and Low church, 146

Hillis, Newell Dwight :

296

Index

Swing Memorial Address,
9-32 ; Swing as pastor,
9 ; his death, 10 ; place
in Chicago, II ; a poetic
preacher, 13, 14; for-
bears, 15; a minister of
culture, 17 ; worth of
beauty and imagination,
18-21 ; Swing's optimism,
21-24 » genius of good
sense in religion, 25—26;
Chicago's debt to, 27-28 ;
great qualities of, 29

Homer, 94, 114, 233, 246

Hortensius, 210, 212, 215

Howard, John, 12

Hugo, Victor, Chapter XIII,
278-293; religion, ra-
tionalism, and atheism in
France, 278-284; ration-
alism parent of Hugo,
282 ; romance and re-
ligion of, 287 ; powerful
use of Christ's ideas by,
290 ; intensity of, aroused
millions, 291 ; character-
ization of, 292 ; a foe to
atheism, 293

Hydra, 232

Inferno of Dante, 238
Irving, Washington, 131
Ithuriel, 234

JEAN VALJEAN, 288
Jefferson, Thomas, 95
Jerusalem, 72
Jesus Christ, 23, 26, 33, 34,

64, 70. 73
Jim Crow car, 133
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 65
Judaea, 37, 52
Justinian, 94

KERBERUS, 233
King Lear, 23
King, Thomas Starr, III
Klopstock, 234

L^ELIA girls, the, 216

Lafayette, 65

Lamartine, 131, 284

Lamennais, 286

Lepidus, 228

Lincoln, Abraham, 12, 23,
33-70, 84, 86, 95, 105,
114, 126, 164, 169, 264

Locke, John, 238

London Bank, 69

Longfellow, H. W., 115, 131

Lord's Prayer in Dante, 152

Lot's wife, 233

Lovejoy, Elijah P., 132

Louis XIV, 152

Luther, Martin, 1 14, Chap-
ter XII, 260-277 ; our
modern glories inherited,
260-263 ; humble birth
and youth of Luther, 264-
267 ; street singing, 268 ;
studies, 270-27 1 ; quali-
ties, 272 ; leaving law,
entered church, 274 ; in
convent no Bible, but
Latin poets, 275-276 ;
piety of, 276 ; elements
of leadership, 277

MABIE, H. W., quoted, 234
Macaulay, T. B., 14, 27,131
Mann, Horace, in
Manning, Cardinal, 1 86
Marat, 85
Mark Antony, see Antonius,

Marcus

Marquette, 238
Mars and the Muses, 49

297

Index

Mary, Queen of Scots, 85
Marys and Magdalens, 240-

241

Matilda, 235
Mathew, Father, 133
Meade, Bishop, 134
Medici, the, 126
Mexican War, 161
Mexico, 279

Michael Angelo, 93, 99, 126
Mill, John Stuart, 99, 185,

239, 240
Miltiades, 28
Milton, 23, 38, 114, 233,

234

Minerva, 240
Minnesingers, the, 237
Mississippi, the, 63
Missouri Compromise, 104
Mozart, 94, 265

NAPOLEON, 95, 165, 283

Nazareth, 72

Nero, 39

New England, 108

New Mexico, 264

Newman, Cardinal, 49

New Testament and woman,

240-241

Newton, Sir Isaac, 238
Nile, the, 16, 52
Numa Pompilius, 241

O'CONNELL, 133
Ovid, 233
Oxford, 41, 145

PAINE, THOMAS, 280

Palestine, 93

Parker, Theodore, 107, 1 10,

116, 132

Parrhasius, 44, 94
Pascal, Blaise, 99, 194, 282

Penelope, 246

Penn, William, 101

Pericles, 240, 245

Pharaohs, 260

Phidias, 93

Phillips, Wendell, 60, Chap-
ter V, 107-123; opening
career of, 108-109 ; elo-
quent anti-slavery men,
Hi; would more har-
mony with government
have made Phillips more
efficient, 112; great men
differ, 113-115; religion
of, 115-117; need of,
118-119; cause of man
still worthy, 120; elo-
quence, 121 ; memory of,
is Freedom, 123 ; referred
to, 132, 172

Pitt, William, 24, 115, 139,
140

Plato, 38, 78, 114

Poetry, worth of, 270-272

Polk, James K., 161

Polydorus, 234

Pompey, 215

Pomponia, 215

Publius, 215

Punch on Lincoln. 6l

Puseyism, 144

Pythagoras, 251

QUEEN ELIZABETH, 40
Queen Victoria, 81

RACHEL, 235

Railroad labourers' losses by

strikes, 184-185
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 40
Raphael, 23

Redmond, Charles L., 133
Richardson, the architect, 10

298

Index

Ritualism, 142-150, 156

Robespierre, 282

Roland, Madame, 262

Roman empire, 37

Romanism, 142, 157

Roman Home, A, Chapter
X, 199-231 ; Tiro and
Ximenes, 199 ; Cicero's
librarian, 200 ; Cicero
and family, 202-204 >
villas of Cicero, 204-209 ;
humours and friends, 210-
21 6; social songs, 217;
Roman feast, 220 ; do-
mestic troubles, 222-224;
tragedies, 225-230

Rome, 93

Royer-Collard, 284

Rufus, 210

Ruskin, John, 131

Russia, 165

ST. JOHN, 39, 49

St. Paul, 39, 95

St. Peter's in Rome, 24, 94,

!37

Salvation Army, 148
Satan, 234
Savonarola, 114, 264
Seer- like visions, 19
Seneca, 93
Shakespeare, 39, 264
Smith, Gerritt, 107
Socrates, 44, 114, 250
Solomon, 251 ; temple of,

148
Spurgeon, Charles H., 13,

27

Star-Spangled Banner, 69
Statius, 235
Sterne, Laurence, 143
Steuben, Baron, 58
Stilling, philosopher, 265

Stone River battle, 159

Sumner, Charles, Chapter
IV, 88-106 ; greatness of
national ideal, 88-94 ;
career of Sumner essen-
tially Christian, 9,6 ; ora-
tion of, against war, 97 ;
austere scholarly coolness
of, 98-99 ; peace, justice,
liberty, the aims of, 101-
104 ; hopefulness of, help
to Lincoln, 105 ; spirit of
hope now needed, 106 ;
Sumner referred to, 107,
no, 132

Swift, Jonathan, 143

Swing, David, see N. D.
Hillis

TENNYSON, ALFRED, 23
Terentia, wife of Cicero,

203-204 ; divorce of, 223
Texas, 161
Thucydides, 94
Tiro, Marcus Tullius, letter

from, 199-231
Trebatius, 210, 211
Tullia, daughter of Cicero,

203-204, 218 ; death ofv

224
Tusculum villa, the, 204-

209

VALLEY FORGE, 57

Verres, 211

Virgil, 39, 94, 114, 195, 232,

246
Voltaire, 282, 284

WAGES advanced by reason,

not violence, 187
Washington and Lincoln, I,

Chapter I, 33-53; sky-

299

Index

watchers for signs of the
times, 33-36 ; the two of-
fer lesson, Washington of
prosperity, Lincoln of ad-
versity, 39-44 ; both fol-
lowed by triumphant
peace, 46 ; religion of, not
sectarian but rational and
filial, 47-49 ; new gener-
ation, new crisis — what
will riches and poverty do
with them ? 50-53
Washington and Lincoln,
II, Chapter II, 54-71;
Americans celebrate birth-
days, ancients, death-
days, 54-55 ; Washington
and Lincoln to us like
saints to Christianity, 56 ;
trusted by their followers,
58-59 ; formed before be-
ing needed, 60; Punch
confesses Lincoln's great-

ness, 6 1 ; retrospect, 62-
64 ; warmth of heart in
both, 65-67 ; nation not
corporation but family,
68-70

Washington, George, 65,94,
114, 120, 285

Washington, Martha, 65

Washington, Lawrence, 41

Waterloo, 88, 288

Webster, Daniel, 36, 69, 76,
95, 114, 126, 131, 139

Wesley, John, 144

Whittier, John G., IOI

Wilberforce, 131

Wilson, Henry, 107

Winkelmann, 131

XAVIER, FRANCIS, 238

ZENOBIA, 262
Zulus, 264

Printed in the United States of America

300

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA

THE MESSAGE OF DAVID SWING TO HIS GENERA