Waymarks, 1870-1891; being discourses, with some account of their occasions

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LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

PRINCETON, N. J

BX 5937 .P67 W3 1892
Potter, Henry Codman, 18J4-

1908.
Waymarks, 1870-1891

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WAYM ARKS

1870-1891

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BEING

JBiscourjses, toitl} Some ^Iccount of tl}eir (Occasions

/ BY

HENRY C. POTTER, D.D., LL.D.

NEW YORK
E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY

31 West Twentv-Third Street
1892

Copyright, 1891,
By E. p. Dutton and Company.

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

TO THE

Clergg anU people of tt)c Hioccsc of Keb) Hork,

AMONG WHOM, AS PRESBYTER AND BISHOP, HE HAS GONE

IN AND OUT FOR TWENTY-THREE YEARS ONLY TO FIND

THEIR SERVICE MORE AND MORE A PRIVILEGE,

These Discourses, rvhich m-e a part of the Story of that Service,

ARE DEDICATED

By their attached friend and servant,

HENRY CODMAN POTTER.

Diocesan House, New York:

St. Andrew^ s Day, November 30, 1891.

CONTENTS.

Page

PREFATORY 1

I. The Priesthood of Science 11

II. The Young Seer 27

III. A Nation's Prayers 44

IV. A Nation's Sorrow 66

V. Sermon Commemorative of John David Wolfe 71

YI. Sermon Commemorative of Adam Xoriue . . 86

VII. A Plea for the American Sunday .... 100

VIII. The Reconstructive Power of Christianity 119

IX. The Church's Needs 135

X. Sermon preached at the Consecration of
the Cathedral of the Incarnation, Garden

City, L I., June 2, 1885 158

Xr. Sermon Preached at the Benediction of
All Saints Cathedral, Albany, N. Y.

Nov. 20, 1888 176

XII. Woman's Place and Work in the Church . 212

XIII. Chlrch Schools in America 226

XIV. The Witness of Saint Paul in Rome ... 243

viii Contents.

Page

XV. The American Church in Paris 256

XVL The Powers and the Power of the Episcopate 274

XVII. The Calling of the Episcopate 293

XVIII. A Consecration Sermon 312

XIX. The Free Church a Witness to the Brother-
hood OF Humanity 327

XX. Agencies of Revival 345

XXI. Mission and Commission : A Sermon preached
at the Consecration of the Rev. Phillips

Brooks, D. D 361

WAYMARKS.

1870-1891.

PREFATORY.

The materials of which history is made are often de-
rived from sources apparently the most remote and un-
promising. Indeed, it may be said to be a chief charm
in histories that have qualities of enduring interest, that
their authors have not disdained such sources, however
insignificant or obscure.

It is in some such considerations that this volume
must find its excuse. During the time of our Civil
War I remember noting upon a friend's book-shelves a
volume with the title " Sermons of the Revolution." I
never opened it, and I am unable, at this distance,
farther to identify it. But I recollect very well the
train upon which, not unnaturally, it started my imagi-
nation. For if the preaching of the Revolutionary
period was at all colored by its incidents, there can be
little doubt that it was stirring and interesting.

In other words, the preaching of any particular decade
or two must inevitably reflect, in some sense, the history
of the time. The pulpit is, indeed, called upon by the
very nature of its office and its commission to be above

1

2 Way marks.

the hour and not below it, to lead and not to follow
public opinion ; and it undoubtedly goes far to explain
its loss of power, whenever and wherever it has lost
power, that it has forgotten its office as an enduring
and, in one sense at any rate, an unchanging witness, in
convulsive and often unseemly efforts to pitch its utter-
ances in the key of some passing excitement. It may
easily vulgarize itself in doing this, and it often has ;
but the fact still remains that, without either vulgarity
or unfaithfulness, it may in many ways wisely empha-
size, illustrate, or forecast the more serious and eventful
activities of a generation.

And certainly — to pursue no farther a question which
might easily open the door to a very large controversy
— this much is true of discourses which are occasional
in their nature, and which have been called out by the
very noteworthy progress of the life of the Church dur-
ing the last quarter of a century, and no less by those
significant movements, not always strictly ecclesiastical
in their character, to which, nevertheless, the quickened
life of the Church has contributed so much.

The discourses which follow are chiefly of this nature.
They mark a considerable variety of incidents, each of
which may be said in some sense to be representative,
and if they do no more, they throw some little light upon
the story of twenty years which, in the life of the Church
even more than in the larger life of the nation, have
been eventful years.

Only a little while before they began our great Civil
War had but just ended; and between 1865 and 1870

Prefatory. 3

the re-united Church and the re-united Nation were
taking account of themselves, and, in the case of the
former especially, coming to recognize the larger oppor-
tunities which confronted it. Of some of these, of the
way in which the Church has sought to improve them,
of the men whom she has called to seize them, of the
institutions she has created or revived, the better to
utilize them, the pages that follow will speak.
The topics included among them are —

The Priesthood of Science,

Missions,

The Organized Work of Women,

Free Churches,

Cathedrals,

Citizenship and the Citizen,

The Episcopate,

Higher Christian Education,

The American Sunday,

New York Merchants,

National Bereavements,

and others which furnish occasion to take note of the
forces which have contributed both to the life of the
nation and the progress of the Church, and those con-
ceptions of their obligations on which, as experience has
shown, that progress will largely depend. That those
conceptions, so far, especially, as the Church is con-
cerned, widely differ, is a fact which to the student of
ecclesiastical history is patent at every turn. Roughly
stated, that difference may be said to be incarnated in
the attitude of the individualists and the institutionalists.

4 Way marks.

To the first of these the religion of the New Testament
is a purely personal message. The men to whom first it
came, it has been trimiiphantly urged, were incapable of
receiving any other ; and the enormous power with which
they acted upon their time resided principally in their
absolute emancipation from every shred of institutional
despotism. That, later, that despotism, expelled at
first, found its way back into the Church and climbed to
the high places of its power, — all this, we are told, is
only another way of saying that primitive Christianity
lost its simplicity in proportion as it gained worldly
prosperity, and gained organic compactness and com-
pleteness as it lost its earlier spirituality.

" On the contrary," declare the Institutionalists, " the
seeds of every organic detail of the Church of the fifth
or the fifteenth century existed in the simpler organiza-
tion of the first. So far from their being a product of
the splendid and ceremonious imperialism of the age
and the empire of Constantino, they were the consum-
mate flower of those germs which Christ planted in the
heart of His Church when he said, " This do," " Go
teach," or spoke the few other simple commands of
which the New Testament has preserved the record.
The principle of authority was there, — the authority of
the Church to decree rites and ceremonies, if neces-
sary to create institutions, to command obedience, in
one word to repeat in the sixteenth, the nineteenth, or
any other century, the Roman imperialism of the first.

Yes, the principle of authority was there ; but it will
be well to remember how it was there. As a remedy

Prefatory. 6

for the lawlessness, the unbelief, the indifference (largely
exaggerated, however) to constitutional rule, whether in
the Church or in the State, which are now said to exist
among us, it is proposed in some zealous and well-mean-
ing quarters to revive the era of authority, to dismiss
that fundamental condition of Anglo-Saxon moral and
intellectual character and conduct which w^as born out
of darkness when the Barons at Runnymede wrung
Magna Charta from the reluctant hands of King John,
which, whether in the life of the Church or the State
has been the seed-principle of hope and progress ever
since, and to erect upon the ruins of the noblest civiliza-
tion and the loftiest type of Christian discipleship which
the world has seen a blind idolatry to the principle of
authority. But what do those who so desire mean when
they speak of authority ? Most surely, they are right
who insist that Christianity is an Institutional as well as
an individual religion. Nothing can be plainer than
that Christ laid the foundation, defined the conditions,
appointed the signs or notes, designated and commis-
sioned tlie officers of a Divine Society, who were to
exercise authority, and in whom the administration of
discipline and the responsibility both for the due teach-
ing and due definition of the Faith, were permanently
vested. But under what conditions ? One listens to
some modern preacher thundering his anathemas from
some pulpit safely removed from the challenge or the
disapproval of his constituency, against all who disown
or interrogate the voice of authority, and then contrasts
such utterances with those of Apostolic men and Apos-

6 Waymarks.

tolic days : " I speak as unto wise men, judge ye ; "
" Know ye not, of your own selves ; " " Let each man be
fully persuaded in his own mind." Plainly enough, the
Church of New Testament days was far enough removed
from that self-sufficient individualism that owns no voice
of authority but its own will, and dismisses the idea of a
divinely constituted government in the Church as equally
hostile to liberty and to right. But, on the other hand,
it was no less removed from that arrogant ecclesiasti-
cism which allows no challenge of its authority nor any
criticism of its methods. Both the one and the other it
sought to commend to the world not so much by its
claims as by its deeds. In the spirit of Saint James it
taught its disciples not so much to boast of its pedigree
as to vindicate the dignity of its lineage by the splendor
of its service. '' Show me thy faith without thy works,"
it said to men whose chief pride was a pride in their or-
thodoxy, '' and I will show thee my faith by my works."

And what it said then it has pre-eminent need to say,
and to say in the language of a lowly and unselfish ser-
vice to-day. It is certainly worth remembering concern-
ing the Founder of Christianity, that though He would
have been justified on grounds which can never be those
of His disciples in making much of His authority and
its source, He never, except when provoked to do so 1)y
explicit challenge, does either. He is content to let His
life and work, and the substance and quality of His
teaching speak for Him.

And His Church may well be content to do the same.
Even if the everlasting assertion of her claims and the

Prefatory. 7

boastful exhibition of her pedigree were not equally un-
interesting and unintelligible to the great majority of
those to whom she comes, there is an essential vulgarity
in such an exhibition which marks at once the novice and
the parvenu. Those who are assured of their position
are not always clamoring that other people shall recog-
nize it. They are content that the claims of honorable
lineage and noble blood shall reveal themselves in nobil-
ity of speech and conduct.

And this is substantially the calling of the Church to-
da3\ Confronted with the problems of to-day, she is
not a creature of to-day. Whensoever any shall ask of
her a reason of the faith that is in her, she may not
forget that glorious past nor that Apostolic ancestry
from which she received it. The Church of Christ is
not a gelatinous body, formless, flabby, invertebrate.
Her organic life is at once continuous and cumulative
in the force of its impact upon the sins and wrongs of
the world, just because it is organic ; and it is at her
peril that she disesteems or undervalues it.

But, all the same, the fact still remains that she must
demonstrate its reality and its power rather by what she
is than by what she says. As she shows to men at once
her flexibility and her constancy, — her power of adjust-
ing herself to particular emergencies, and her tenacity
in maintaining her supernatural faith and order, — she
will best prove her Scriptural and Catholic doctrine and
demonstrate her possession of an immortal heritage.
In a generation eager to believe that anything new is as
good or better than anything old, she must make it plain

8 Wayynarks.

that " the old is better," the old faith, the old order, the
old discipline, by showing that these can adjust them-
selves to every new emergency and prove not unequal
to the gravest of them.

It is out of this strong persuasion that the discourses
which follow have come. Diverse as are the occasions
which inspired them, and the subjects with which they
deal, they will be found, it is believed, to have an essen-
tial unity in an underlying aim to vindicate the message
of the Church as a living message, and the truths which
are her inheritance as capable almost indefinitely of re-
statement and re-adaptation, but unchanging in their
substance, and eternal in their appropriateness alike to
the needs of the personal soul and to the manifold wants
of human society.

H. C. P.
St. James Day,

July 25, 1891.

THE PRIESTHOOD OF SCIENCE.

Early in this century a lad entered the Lehigh Valley who was
destined to leave upon its future an enduring mark. He
brought nothing with him save a resolute purpose and the
promise of a vigorous mind, but with these two weapons he
carved his way, by steadily advancing steps, to fortune and
honor. Whatever others may have done for the region in
which he spent his life and energies, the part which Asa
Packer bore in the development of its physical resources and
in the building of its great water and rail ways must always
occupy a commanding place. Beginning with the humblest
tasks, he speedily made himself ht for others that were
higher; and as he rose step b}^ step in wealth and influence
he more and more clearly discerned and vigorously seized the
opportunities which opened before him. Without earl}^ ad-
vantages himself, he did not disparage their worth to others,
and so there was formed and grew in his mind the idea of a
University which, under distinctly Christian sanctions and
in cordial recognition of the place and office of the Church in
education, should especially provide that training in the
physical sciences which, while not disdaining other culture,
might best equip young men for the tasks and problems
which the founder of Lehigh University had found at every
turn confronting him.

It is not an uncommon characteristic of successful men
who have won success without the aid of collegiate training
to disparage and disesteem it. That wealth and place and
power have been won without it is proof enough to them

10 Waymarks.

that they and others do not need it. But, as in religion, as
the late Lord Beaconsfield with characteristic felicity desig-
nated them, there are "maimed rites," so in human achieve-
ment there are one-sided and deformed results. There is
Avealth without modesty, and power without discrimination,
and success as bald and barren of any humane grace or charm
as a steam-pump. And operating in its sphere precisely in
the same way as does a steam-pump, successful manhood may
churn out of the bowels of the earth or the depths of some
undetected chance its colossal fortune, and be at the end of
its career as empty of beauty or appreciation for excellence,
or the love of wisdom, or learning, or goodness, as at the
beginning. It is not only the charm but the glory of cul-
ture that it helps to make one more largely discerning and
more truly symmetrical ; and it no more disproves the value of
learning that successful men are often indifferent to this,
than it disproves the value of light that a blind man cannot
see it.

It was the happy distinction of Asa Packer that he could
recognize the value of gifts and privileges which he himself
had not enjoyed; and there is something very inspiring in
the career of one who ennobled great wealth by so wise and
noble a use of it. Judge Packer's gifts and bequests to the
University amounted to over three millions of dollars, and he
provided that its instruction should be forever free.

The two sermons that follow were both preached before
the faculty and students of Lehigh University, — the first on
June 18, 1871, and the second on the occasion of the conse-
cration of the beautiful Memorial Chapel for the University
erected by the daughter of the founder, Mrs. Mary Packer
Cummings, on Founder's Day, October 13, 1887. The
preacher gladly records his indebtedness in connection with
the former to the late principal Shairp's admirable volume
"Religion and Culture."

I.

THE PRIESTHOOD OF SCIENCE.

Thepriesfs lips should keep knowledge. — Malachi ii. 7.

Keep it, that is to say, not in the sense of secreting,
but of acquiring. The Hebrew word ^*'?^'. — translated
'' keep " — has an expressiveness which our English
version fails to give. The idea which lingers in
its root is that of open-eyed and expectant alertness,
and the meaning here is that the priest is to be not
merely a mausoleum of buried information, but an
open-mouthed acquirer of still fuller knowledge. Some
men's wisdom is betrayed supremely by their reticence.
They are chiefly remarkable for what they do not say.
They wear a sage look, but their lips are stiffly com
pressed, as if they feared lest their knowledge should
somehow leak out unawares. The text gives no counte-
nance to such. It bids the priest's lips keep knowledge
by cherishing that interrogating, inquisitive, receptive
temper which daily seeks to increase it. The priest is
not so much to hoard what he has as to aim to greaten
past acquirements by the gain of new and larger truths.
He is to utter words of wisdom, but he is first to see to
it that he had some words of wisdom to utter.

12 Way marks.

In other words, the meaning of the language is that
the priest should be a student, — leading and teaching
others, because he is being daily led and taught himself.
And so 1 accept it as not inaptly describing a future
mission of those to whom, especially, I speak to-day.
Yours, gentlemen of the Lehigh University, is a priest-
hood which, though it be less technically religious, is as
veritable as any other. " Homo Minister et Interpres
Naturae," is the legend which I read upon the fore-front
of your Institution ; and what could more aptly or more
suggestively intimate the mission which you are here
training yourselves to fulfil ? Is it not to be your high
function to leave the herd behind, and pass onward into
most intimate communion with science and with Nature ?
Is it not your rare privilege to lay your listening ears
closest to the lips of the silent oracle, and catch so a
murmur of truths which less tutored learners may not
hope to hear ? Is it not reserved for some of you, as
you shall go on turning over the strata of the earth's
surface, as one would turn over the pages of a book,
to read off from them the vindication of that law which
hath its seat in the bosom of God ? And if so, are you
not called, like Moses, to bear these tables of stone on
which God has written His eternal mind, back again to
the great congregation of humanity, and unfolding there
their meaning, so to be the true and veritable priests of
science ? Accept then the priesthood to which you are
called, and reverence it as sucli ! In grouping the call-
ings which you are to follow under so sacred a name, I
would fain have you think very highly of those callings.

The Priesthood of Science. 13

A man who thinks meanly of his own vocation, what-
ever it may be, provided it be an honest one, is very apt
sooner or later to have a tolerably valid reason for
thinking meanly of himself. Least of all, surely, ought
this to be their error who are to analyze the elements
or disinter the buried treasures, or construct the ever-
lengthening highways, of this wonderful world of ours.
He who deals with Nature, whether in levelling her
mountains and filling up her valleys, or in applying the
solvent of his patient scrutiny to her manifold secret
resources, has a calling at once most dignified and most
responsible. The ancients were wont to put their roads
under the patronage of their deities, and verily we
moderns must needs look with something of their ear-
lier wonder and awe upon triumphs of civil engineering
in those old days which seem well-nigh superhuman.
Nay, more, a man who bears so important a part as
does he who constructs some great highway, in binding
continents together and widening the empire of Chris-
tian civilization, must verily, I think, sometimes recog-
nize how sacred and conspicuous a part he is bearing in
hastening the Millennial glories !

And if he is, the question is surely not an indifferent
one, how may he best discharge his high responsibilities,
and most worthily bear his part in the carving and archi-
tecture of a better future ? It is that question, as I
conceive, which is so aptly and comprehensively an-
swered in the text.

The true minister of any science must, in the first
place, be —

14 Waymarks,

1. A student. It is too commonly concluded that
life may generally be divided into two periods, the
period of preparation, and the period of performance.
And so when many a man leaves college walls he bids
farewell to books and to study, forever. Has he not
to work for his living, he tells you ; and how can he
hope to be doing more than his daily task ? Ah, how
many such there are in the busy world about us, who
have been swallowed up by the mere drudgery of their
vocation ! They had glorious visions of great achieve-
ments once ; they had meant to leave something be-
hind them, when they went out of the world, whereby
the race should have cause to remember them. But
the dry routine or the coarse ambitions of life have
been too much for them. They follow what they call
professions, not trades, but they have turned their pro-
fession into a trade, and are simply manufacturing their
knowledge into a marketable commodity. " Of our
day it may truly be said," to borrow the language of
an English scholar,^ " that high living and plain think-
ing are the all in all." In other words, " in an age of
great material prosperity like the present, when the
comforts and conveniences of physical life have vastly
increased and science is every day increasing them,"
these comforts are apt to seem, in themselves, a satisfy-
ing portion, and the thing to be chiefly sought after.
Suppose that one of you here this morning were offered
the alternative of joining an exploring expedition to
South America for the purpose of making an examina-
1 J. C. Shairp, Religion and Culture, p. 50.

The Priesthood of Science. 15

tion of its mineral resources in the interests of science
and the world's increased knowledge, the compensation
being a bare maintenance, or a position as mining engi-
neer in connection with a Nevada mining company, your
salary being five thousand dollars and your expenses,
can you doubt that the spirit of the day would bid you
accept the latter ? Yet the one offers you an unexplored
continent with who knows what glorious secrets slum-
bering in its bosom, while from the other you can only
hope, it may be, for a narrow range of familiar and
traditional processes. To yield to such temptations is
the danger, as in these days of well-nigh every other
profession, so of those professions which are to be
yours.

And so I ask you, standing here upon their threshold,
to remember that knowledge is forever sacreder and
more precious than the merely material and market-
able results of knowledge. Yours may be circumstances
which shall shut you up to a very narrow round, and
demand of vou verv fatis;uino; toils. Yet I verilv be-
lieve that you can find no happier recreation than in
carrying the studies which you have begun here into
other and more active spheres. You will not account
me disrespectful to the thorough and admirable curric-
ulum of your University if I remind you that when you
have traversed it, you have as students just begun the
work of life, — just learned to use the faculties with
which a gracious Providence has endowed you. Use
them, I beseech you, upon new and ever-aspiring tasks !
Have an ideal in the profession which you have chosen,

16 Waymarks.

up toward which you are daily reaching. It may be an
impossible ideal. The old alchemists never discovered
the philosopher's stone, though they burned the mid-
night oil for a lifetime, and melted whole fortunes in
their ever-bubbling crucibles. But what helpful truths
came out of those smoky laboratories, and above all,
w^hat sublime examples of patient and untiring, ever-
interrogating industry were lived in them, to be the
inspiration of every student of physical science or art
ever since ! " I had to be my own mason, my own
plasterer, my own water-carrier," said Bernard Palissy,
telling what toils it cost him to discover for pottery a
w^hite enamel ; " I had even to transport bricks on my
own back, — I had to watch my furnace and keep its
heat aglow for six consecutive days and nights. But
meantime, and though disheartened by my oft-repeated
failures, I found moments in which to study chemistry,
and so, the road by which to conquer every difficulty."
If such a man had been vanquished by his difficulties,
as many a faithful student of art or science has been
since then, he would still have served the race best
of all by his heroic devotion to a seemingly unattain-
able ideal. " What have we," cry the mercenary mate-
rialists of our day, in the words of a recent writer,^ " to
do with ideals ? Let us leave them to the rapt poet,
to the recluse thinker, or to the dreaming visionary. It
is the actual, the hard facts of life that we have to
deal with ; to push our way in the world, and, hemmed
in by, and often well-nigh crushed beneath, imperious

1 Shairp, Religion and Culture, pp. 25, 26.

The Priesthood of Science. IT

circumstances, to maintain the struggle for existence.
Enough for us if we can battle through them without
being overpowered. Ideals ! let us leave them to those
who have wealth and leisure : they are among the
luxuries, not the necessaries of life. For us, we have
enough to do to make something of the real."

" To make something of the real. Yes, that is it,
precisely. But how," it has well been asked,^ "are we to
make anything of the real, actual, unless we have some
aim to direct our efforts, some clue to guide us through
its labyrinths ? " And this aim, this clue, is just what
is meant by the Ideal. You may dislike the word, and
reject it, but the thing, if you would live any life above
that of mere brutes, you cannot get rid of. An aim,
an ideal of some sort, if you have reason, and " look
before and after," you must have. True, no man's life
can be wholly occupied with the ideal, not even the
poet's or the philosopher's. Each man must acquaint
himself with numberless details and must manipulate
them, — must learn the stuff that the world is made of,
and how to deal with it. But though most of us are
immersed in business, or battling all life through with
tough conditions, yet, if we are not to sink into mere
selfish animality we must needs have some master-aim to
guide us, — " something that may dwell upon the heart
though it be not " always or often " named upon the
tongue." For, if there be sometimes a danger lest the
young enthusiast, through too great devotion to an
abstract ideal, should essay the impossible, and bruise

1 Religion and Culture.
2

l8 Waymarks.

or crush himself against the walls of destiny, far more
common is it for men, in our day, to be so crushed
under manhood's burdens that they abandon all the
higher aims of their youth, and submit to be driven
like gin-horses —

" round the daily scene
Of sad subjection and of sick routine."

Bear with me, my brothers, if I urge you to see to it
that you are betrayed into no such dreary blunder.
While cherishing and utilizing the practical side of
whatever studies you have chosen here, or calling here-
after, remember that it has upper walks, with loftier
secrets than any you have penetrated yet. Be a better
worker, because you are the better student. Challenge
the difficulties in those studies to whose application to
common life you have devoted yourselves. Believe
me, though you may not always solve the problem for
whose key you may be searching, you will win some-
thing better than any single secret, — not merely more
supple faculties, and readier mental aptitudes, but a
heartier love of any and every truth for its own sake,
and a more willing and docile readiness to follow
loyally wheresoever that truth may lead you.

2. And this leads me to remind you that, as" mem-
bers of the noble priesthood of science and of learning,
it behooves you to be not merely students, but catho-
lic students. Your own studies here will, I doubt not,
have been and will be my best allies in enforcing this
necessity. For surely a student of any particular de
partment of learning cannot advance in it a great way

The Priesthood of Science, 19

Avitliout finding that there are other departments of
learning, which he must take as torches in either hand,
if he would find his way much farther amid its practi-
cal difficulties. What, for instance, could a civil en-
gineer do without some knowledge both of geology
and of chemistry ? He must know the fibre of the hills
through which he is hewing his way, and the dura-
bility of the materials with which he is piling up his
slender and yet much-enduring trestle-work. And
such a case is a type of innumerable others. We draw
a line around certain domains of knowledge, and call
this one or that one by the name of a particular sci-
ence. But, in fact, each science invades and overlaps
the other. The surgeon must be something of a cutter,
and the chemist something of a botanist. No man can
shut himself away from any one of the wide fellow-
ships of human knowledge, and say, " I have no need
of thee!"

Says Emerson : " I knew a draughtsman, employed
in a public survey, who found that he could not
sketch the rocks until their geological structure was
first explained to him." When he knew that, then
his geology helped his art, and he did his work at once
deftly and truly. Even so of departments of knowl-
edge that seem the farthest apart from each other.
" What connection is there," we should be tempted to
ask, " between the study of anatomy and bridge-build-
ing?" But " Duhamel built a bridge by letting in a
piece of stronger timber for the middle of the under
surface, getting his hint to do so from the structure

20 Waymarks.

of the shin-bone." ^ Smeaton wanders through the
forest, and there communmg with rural nature, after
a fashion which the modern materialist would perhaps
consider very unprofitable, he finds the clue to the con-
struction of the Eddystone lighthouse in the outlines
of an oak-tree. Indeed, as Watt was a geometrician,
and Michael Angelo a sculptor as well as a painter, so
there are very few of any of the great names in sci-
ence or art who have not shown the immense advan-
tage to any particular calling of widening one's view
and aim beyond its particular limits. And this, too,
with reference not merely to what may be called
practical or material advantage, but with reference, su-
premely, to the highest and truest advantage. ''A
man is more than his trade." The spirit that is in
each man craves other nourishment than the bread
he wins. In saying this I do not forget that we have
each one of us our special work to do, and that it
often tasks all our strength, whether in the study, the
class-room, office, or the mine, or the laboratory, to
do it.

But while fully acknowledging that, in order to suc-
ceed in any particular calling, we must not only be dis-
tinctively harnessed to it, but must also bring to it the
finest edge of faculty and a steadfast devotion of all
that we have learned by accurate and exclusive techni-
cal training, I must still believe, in the language of a
wise teacher of our own time, that '' there is something
more than this and greater ; which, if we desire to be-

1 Emerson, Essay on Art, p. 38.

The Priesthood of Science. 21

come not merely useful instruments, but men, must
never be lost sight of. The professional or scientific
inquirer who, over and above his daily duties and busi-
ness relations, has learned to feel that he has other
relations, wider and more permanent, with his fellow-
beings in all ages, that he is a debtor for all that he
has and is to a wider circle of things than that with
which he outwardly comes in contact, that he is an
heir of all the great and good who have lived before
him, — is not on that account a worse workman, and
is certainly a higher and better man." Unless he is
willing to give himself up to narrow prejudices and
distorted theories, the student of our day, whether of
science or of literature, must often consent to turn
aside from the paths of his own specific department,
and learn something of the great moral, social, and po-
litical movements of the world about him. He has
other duties than those of his own specific calling, and
he may not safely neglect them, nor the study that
fits him to discharge them. There are other inspira-
tions, if he will but seek them, than any that await
him in successful achievements in his own particular
vocation.

I am not blind to the danger — never surely greater
than in our day — of spreading our efforts over too
large a space, and so making all our acquirements
thin and meagre and superficial ; but over against that
danger there stands another, equally perilous to many
scientific and professional men, of so exclusively con-
centrating their interests upon a narrow space and sub-

22 Waymarks.

ject that they cease ultimately to be either good citizens
or humane men. The state, society, the untaught mul-
titudes about us, have each a claim upon our interest,
our energy, and our regard. We may not neglect those
claims without equal injury to those who represent
them and to ourselves. More than ever, in these days,
does each man among us, no matter what the partic-
ular range of his aims and inquiries, need to be also,
a student of history, of political economy, and of moral
science. When he has become so life will mean more
to him than it has ever done before, and he himself
will sooner or later rise to be the power that he ought
to be in his generation, and the blessing that he may
be to his kind. Out of a more catholic habit of in-
quiry will come a more catholic breadth of sympa-
thy, and so the wide-minded, large-hearted student will
learn the meaning of a greater toleration, a greater
helpfulness, and a greater love !

3. And this leads me to say, finally, that it behooves
you, my brothers, to be not only students, and catholic
students, but also reverent students. Those of you
whose future will be concerned principally with the phy-
sical sciences, are commonly supposed to be in great and
imminent danger of unbelief. For one, I venture to
account such a supposition as often ill-founded, and
oftener still unjust. An English bishop having spoken
of Mr. Darwin's speculations as a " denial of the crea-
tion," and as " bad and devilish imaginations," he was
straightway and worthily rebuked by more than one
Christian student of science, who showed conclusively

The Priesthood of Science. 23

that Darwinism neither denied the Divine creation, nor
asserted man to be self-originated. Indeed, a late
writer in an English periodical maintains that Darwin-
ism strengthens the case for Christianity against un-
belief ; and whether we may choose to regard him as
having proved or failed to prove his position, one must
needs hail with thankfulness the dawning of a day
when the champions of the religion of Jesus Christ are
no longer swift to dub every new explorer in science
with the sweeping stigma of " infidel."

But while this is true, we may not disguise from our-
selves that there is always danger lest the man of
science, in dealing with the material facts of Nature,
and tracing second causes, should forget that there is a
great first Cause, and that all the phenomena of physical
life rightly studied, only argue an infinite and spirit-
ual life, which forever presides in and over them. As
you go forth, with such skill as you have acquired here,
to challenge the mysteries of Nature, or to pursue your
studies in whatsoever direction, lay aside the tools and
implements of your various callings not infrequently, I
beseech you, and hearken for the whispers of a voice
within you, which witnesses to the existence and sover-
eignty of a Being who is the Author of Nature, to whom
this wondrous and complex universe of ours is " but a
drop of a bucket, and who taketh up the isles as a very
little thing." No telescope has ever seen Him, and yet
He waits to be our supreme and unerring teacher. In
bidding you to hearken for this voice sometimes, I do
not bid you be a whit the less earnest and entliusiastic

24 Waymarks,

and inquisitive in whatsoever line of inquiry you have
ah'eady resolved to pursue. But remember, there is
something else within you than the busy, inquisitive,
thinking brains. Remember that there beats beneath
whatever cunning plaitings of custom may seek to hide
it, a great, eager, unsatisfied, hungry heart. If in your
studies you are willing to starve that, if you never seek
for an object that shall teach the dormant love-power in
you rightly and worthily to love, then, believe me, you
are dooming the neediest side of your nature at once to
ignorance and starvation. And therefore I entreat you
supremely to lay the foundations of all your future stud-
ies in a reverent hearkening to that Being who is at
once the Creator of the Universe and your Creator, and
in a personal discipleship to that incarnate Christ through
whom supremely He has revealed Himself. Let every
other study be your schoolmaster to bring you to His
feet who can alone solve for you the sternest problems
or illumine your deepest ignorance. Knowing Him the
world will get a new aspect, and all your studies, in
whatsoever domain, a higher and sacreder meaning.
When the facts of Nature perplex you, when the seem-
ing tangle of history dismays or disheartens you, when
shadowy possibilities of the future threaten to over-
whelm you, you will know that His hand who is behind
the darkness holds the unerring clue, and that out of
all the seeming mysteries of the present, that Sovereign
Hand shall sooner or later bring forth divinest order
and beauty and sunshine !

Nay, more. Coming as reverent and believing stu-

The Priesthood of Science. 25

dents to this the greatest of all teachers, Himself at
once unerring wisdom and infinite compassion and res-
cue, you shall also find that as a pupil and learner in
His school, each one of you has here a sacred work to
do, a heavenly cause to serve. Not renouncing any up-
right earthly cause or calling, you shall yet see how, in
it and through it, you may be serving a cause at once
grander and nobler and holier, — the cause of Christ,
and of His Redeemed Humanity I

Crossing this mighty continent of ours not long ago,
by means of that last marvel of our American engineer-
ing whose daily track-laying, as 1 have been told, was
wont to beat the slow-moving wagon-trains of emigrants
that marched beside it, I found myself again and again
exclaiming, '^ What grander calling could there be than
thus to write one's name in iron across the unsullied
page of those virgin western prairies, as part builder of
the highway that shall bind together Pekin and Paris,
London and San Francisco, the commerce of Calcutta
and the manufactures of Manchester, in one bright
zone, whose central gem shall be our own American
metropolis ! "

And yet there is a grander calling. May it be yours
and mine, my friends, to braid it in with whatsoever toil
or study is ours, whether within these University walls
or beyond them ; to build those other highways through
the stony hearts and desert lives of men over which the
Master Builder shall at last come back again, to claim
this world and all its treasures for His own ; to bear

26 Waymarks.

along the paths that Christian labor has cast up the
saving message of God's love, and so, by steadfast con-
quest of all sin and ignorance, to open wide the gates for
His enduring sunshine !

" Then comes the statelier Eden back to men ;
Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm ;
Then springs the crowning race of human kind ! "

II.

THE YOUNG SEER.

Your young men shall see visions. — Joel ii. 23.

In an old book, among the oldest in the volume that
includes it, there occur these words. They are the
words of one who, looking forward to a time beyond
his own, discerns the promise of a day of larger knowl-
edge and of nobler life. Out of its old ignorance
and feebleness the Israel of the future is to be lifted
towards the light. The slumbrous powers, the mean
affections, the trailing aspirations, — all these were to
be touched, awakened, ennobled.

Well, as we know, they were. The time came when
on the spiritual consciousness of a group of obscure
peasants there broke a new world. Gathered one day
in that city which had been for generations the centre
of their national life, waiting in expectant silence and
pause, there came to them the vision of a new life, a
new hope, a new earth. Suddenly, and in a moment
as it were, the veil of old prejudices and prepossessions
fell away from them, and all that they saw was trans-
figured. The world was no longer the same, for it was
the home of a Divine Society — man was no longer the

28 Waymarks.

same, for he was the child of a Divine Father ; and
duty, turned to privilege, became the joy of being.
Like men aflame (drunk with new wine, the critics of
their time declared !) they went forth from an upper
room and conquered as they went. No parallel in the
history of propagandism has yet been found to that of
the twelve first messengers of the religion of the New
Testament. Without the prestige of ancestry or eccle-
siastical rank, without the influence of the powerful,
without wealth or eloquence or art, they won their
way first to a hearing and then to a following so eager
and so ardent that in a little while men heralded their
coming to some new field of missionary labor with the
cry, " These that have turned the world upside down
are come hither also ! " And exaggerated as the words
must have sounded, they were, in fact, the words of
truth and soberness. It was a revolutionary force
which came with these young disciples into contact
with the older civilizations of their time, and which,
wherever it went, " overturned and overturned," and so
prepared the way for Him whose right it was to rule.
Nothing could resist its power. No class, nor caste, nor
nation could deny its spell. There were those who
had seen a vision, and their vision had illumined and
transformed them !

But to this remarkable result there had been a con-
dition precedent. We own, I take it, the force of that
argument which in nature urges that the existence of
a faculty implies the sphere or medium in which it is to
find its exercise. The construction of the eye is itself

The Young Seer. 29

the clearest proof that somewhere there must be that
thing which we call light, in which it finds at once its
origin and its interpretation. And, in the same way,
we who are here, at any rate, are accustomed to main-
tain the existence of what we call a spiritual faculty,
and to argue from it for the existence of that spiritual
realm of which it is at once the complement and the
prophecy. " Like the peasant-poet, Clare, who in his
childhood set out from his father's cottage, in order," as
a gifted Englishman has lately reminded us, " to touch,
if he might, the point where earth and sky meet," so,
we are wont to say, " we are drawn toward far horizons,
clad in colors of the air," by the impulse and sentiment
w^hich comes from the Father of Lights.

Yes, but there is, I repeat, a condition precedent.
i\\ those domains of knowledge which are lower than
spiritual knowledge, what is it which goes before the
vision, of whatever nature it may be ? I answer, It is
culture, — culture which prepares the way for the vision,
and which makes it at once possible and imminent. Go
back to the illustration of the eye, and of that lowest
group of powers, the senses, for which the eye stands.
There died, the other day, in our own Cambridge, a
man who on its mechanical side had done almost as
much, perhaps, to advance the science of astronomy as
any one of his generation. His telescopes were the
wonder of the curious, and the matchless treasures of
the learned and expert. Two hemispheres paid tribute
to his skill, and his handiwork found recognition in the
foremost observatories of the world. Do you know,

30 Wat/marks.

now, how he finished those marvellous lenses which,
beforehand, it was declared, were beyond the possibil-
ities of constructive skill ? He was indeed familiar with
the scientific technique of his calling ; but I have been
told that it was not alone by the nice measurement of
any instrument, however delicate or minutely accurate,
that he achieved his result, but by the marvellous accu-
racy of his eye and marvellous delicacy of his touch.

But were either of these aptitudes born in him ?
Their germs undoubtedly were; but, just as surely,
their ultimate perfection was the result of a long course
of training and development, — of that thing, in other
words, which we call culture. And, whatever the na-
tive faculty, gift, endowment, this is the invariable con-
dition of its highest exercise, and, ordinarily, of its
successful exercise at all.

In fact, it is this which explains our presence here
to-day. Unlike most institutions, this University owes
its existence under God to one man. He was one
who, both by what he was and by what he achieved,
revealed himself as the possessor of exceptional pow-
ers. The history of this region, in which his wise
forecast, his large grasp, his courage, resolution, and
eminent capacity of organization and administration
found their fitting opportunity, is a record, in the de-
velopment of its vast resources and in the extension
of its great arteries of traffic and travel, of his pre-
eminent gifts. But great as those gifts were, and
conspicuous as was the success which they achieved,
their possessor was above the petty vanity which

The Young Seer. 31

imagined that they could not have been bettered by a
previous and adequate culture. On the contrary, as the
bishop of this diocese said of him on the first "Foun-
der's Day," " he had met many occasions on which he
would have found great advantage if to his practical
skill he could have added that scientific knowledge of
metallurgy, mining, and civil engineering which is now
freely imparted in this University." ^ And it was the
recognition of this fact which inspired him to undertake
the noble enterprise which we assemble to promote to-
day. His keen discernment recognized that, vigorous
and adroit as may be a human hand by native endow-
ment, both vigor and skill are developable qualities,
with a capacity of enlargement almost indefinite.

And so of whatever else the human hand may stand
for. Whether it be the ear of the musician or the
brain of the philosopher, just in so far as you can add
to the original gift the skill, the delicacy, the trained
discrimination, which come witli culture, by so much
you have greatened that gift. The eye of the artist and
the eye of the peasant are as similar in construction
as any human eyes can be. But tlie vision which they
see is as different as chaos from Eden, or light from
darkness. Indeed, the capacity to see any vision of
beauty or nobleness at all is largely conditioned upon
the training which has bestowed it.

And even so it was with those who one day saw their
vision, as they waited in an upper room. We are ac-
customed to speak of tlie founders of Christianity

1 Memorial discourse of Rt. Rev. M A. De Wolfe Howe, D. D., 1879.

32 Waymarks.

(though from a different motive) as their earliest and
least friendly critics spoke of them, as ignorant and un-
learned men. But, in fact, theirs was a culture the
like of which the world has never known. It was their
high privilege to sit at the feet of a Teacher whose peer
humanity has not seen. Says Mr. Lecky, in his " His-
tory of European Morals : " " It has been reserved for
Christianity to present to the world an ideal character,
which, through all the changes of eighteen centuries,
has filled the hearts of men with an impassioned love ;
has shown itself capable of acting on all ages, nations,
temperaments, and conditions ; has not only been the
highest pattern of virtue, but the highest incentive to
its practice, and has exercised so deep an influence
that it may truly be said that the simple record of three
short years of active life has done more to regenerate
. . . mankind than all the disquisitions of philoso-
phers and all the exhortations of moralists."

But these three years of active life were spent in the
close and constant companionship of twelve men, whose
whole future w^as revolutionized by the contact which
fchat companionship involved. Consider for a moment
the enlargement of powers which came to these men
from daily contact with their Master. We know how
blind and narrow and unspiritual they were in the first
days of their discipleship. But that which came to pass
with two of them when, after that post-resurrection
meeting on the way to Emmaus, their eyes were opened
and they knew Him, their Lord, happened to all the
rest. The shrunken hearts were somehow deepened

The Young Seer. 33

and enlarged. The stifled aspiration took to itself wings
and soared, and thus they became men of power. It
was not the vision alone, but it was culture, training,
nurture, preparing the way for the vision.

We, in this age, are not in any very imminent danger
of underestimating this truth in its relation to our intel-
lectual and physical life. Inventive genius and scien-
tific cunning have united their forces in order to give to
man the highest possible development of his powers and
the most adequate training of his gifts. In every de-
partment of inquiry the native faculty finds itself supple-
mented by tools and a nurture which daily grow more
various and many-sided. Our educational systems for
our poorest are ampler in their resources than those
which wealth could command a century ago for the rich.
That no gift is to be left to its original limitations of ca-
pacity, that every sense, taste, intellectual power and
endowment is to be enriched by a nurture which begins in
infancy and endures with conscious existence, this has
come to be, at any rate, the ideal conception of education.

3nt with what powers shall this culture mainly deal,
and what faculties shall it develop ? We have a new
philosophy of the culture of the body, or rather it may
be more accurately called the revival of an old phil-
osophy, which tells us, in tones which are daily more
imperious and more aggressive, that the culture of our
forefathers was narrow and meagre and one-sided, —
that it made no provision, or no due provision, for the
development of the biceps muscle and the true ennoble-
ment of one's flexors and extensors. So loud and domi-

3

34 Waymarks,

nant has this philosophy become that venerable colle-
giate dignitaries are to be seen on every hand standing
cap in hand and saying to their pupils : " Yes, young
gentlemen, undoubtedly your conception of culture is the
true one. The divinest thing on earth, or almost the
divinest, is a foot-ball, a tennis racket, or a cricket-bat.
Give yourself largely if not wholly to these things, and
then graciously vouchsafe to us tlie fragments of your
time for such other education as you may condescend to
submit to. Greatness is in bulk and your body is the
biggest part of you ! "

Let no one assume that because some of us think that
that culture which is physical has too large a share in
the modern curriculum of collegiate training, it should
have none at all, or that its advantages are not consider-
able though they may not be pre-eminent. " Mens
sana^^ and the rest of it is excellent doctrine at all
times, and it only becomes sophistical when it is fool-
ishly exaggerated. 1 am not, indeed, sure that it might
not be well to substitute for at least a part of it a culture
of manners, which, while it cannot be purely physical,
might wisely be encouraged if only for the amelioration
of that undergraduate savagery which threatens to bring
back upon us an era of barbarism under the disguise of
" sport. " What I am contending for now, however, is
something of larger consequence and far loftier concern
than manners. By all means let us have the culture of
the body as well as of the mind. Let us train young
men to respect the instrument as well as that of which it
is to be the instrument. But that of which the body is

The Young Seer. 35

ordained to be the instrument is not alone the instinct
of pleasure, nor merely the intellect or the powers that
tliinlv. Enthroned above these, and reaching out to
reo-ions on the threshold of which mere intellio'ence

o o

stands in questioning silence, simply because it can go
no further, there is another faculty, another range of
powers which speak to the aspirations of nobleness,
which speak to the conscience of duty, which speak to
the soul of God. The culture of the body and of the
brain may quicken the reason and enlarge the mind ; it
may refine the senses and the tastes ; it may greaten that
wdiich thinks in vigor and acuteness, — but what of the
moral nature ? " In the most brilliant period of Athen-
ian greatness," as a gifted Englishman has lately de-
scribed it,^ when art had reached its acme of noble
simplicity, when poetry and oratory shed over the public
life a glowing atmosphere of grace and beauty, when in-
tellects unrivalled in force and subtlety discussed ques-
tions which men are debating still, — evils which are not
so much as named among ourselves were 'sapping the
very foundations of moral order, and were made by men
whose own personal purity is above suspicion the subject
of jest and witticism. And other ages, splendid in art,
bright with intellectual achievement, — in Rome, the age
of Augustus ; in Italy, the age of the Medici and of Leo
the Tenth ; in France, the age of Louis the Fourteenth,
— these too have been ages of a culture which was quite
compatible with heartless frivolity and with " rank cor-
ruption ruining all within. "

^ St. Paul at Athens : Chas. Shakespere, p. 38.

36 Wayinarks,

Or, to come a little nearer home, are we quite sure
that in our own country and in our own day the cultiva-
tion of the understanding, combined though it be with
the cultivation of taste, may safely supersede the faith
and the culture of the soul ? Says a witness whose par-
tiality for the spiritual powers of man is certainly not
extravagant — 1 mean Mr. Herbert Spencer : " The be-
lief in the moralizing effects of intellectual culture is
flatly co7itradicted by facts. Are not fraudulent bank-
rupts educated people, and getters-up of bubble com-
panies, and devisers of corners [and syndicates of opera-
tors, he might have added], and makers of adulterated
goods, and users of false trade-marks, and retailers who
have light weights, and owners of unseaworthy ships,
and those who cheat insurance companies, and those who
carry on turf chicaneries, and the great majority of gam-
blers ? Or, to take a more extreme form of turpitude, is
there not among those who have committed murder by
poison within our memories a considerable number of
the educated, — a number bearing as large a ratio to the
educated as does the total number of murderers to the
population ?" 1

Mr. Spencer's illustration may be extreme, but it is
his, not mine ; and it is certainly of value in view of its
source.

But be its value great or small, there is little room
for controversy concerning the fact for which it stands.
No nation in the world believes so profoundly in the
popularization of mental culture as our own, and no

1 The Study of Sociology, p. 363, Eug. ed.

The Young Seer. 37

people has provided for it with such princely liberality.
To give to everybody who wants it, not only the rudi-
ments of an education, but to make the training of
youth include the higher accomplishments as well as
elementary instruction, — this is the ambition of a popu-
lar system of intellectual culture whose reach and range
we claim to be the glory of our American republic. 1
may not discuss that system here, nor review its influ-
ence for good or evil upon our social and domestic life.
But this at least may be said, that it does not concern
itself greatly, if at all, with the powers in man which
are the highest, and that it offers little or nothing to
quicken his nobler aspirations or to satisfy his deepest
longings. With this culture the aim of life is to teach
men how to " get on," and to brighten existence with en-
joyment. But it does not take a great while to discover
that success is not satisfaction, and that in the matter of
one's inmost consciousness pleasure and peace are not
synonymous terms. There comes a time with every
earnest soul when it is filled with a profound dissatis-
faction, and when the youthful powers and the fresh en-
thusiasm long for a nobler field and a loftier range of
action. I appeal to the young men who are here before
me to-day. Is it not true, my brothers, that there are
times when you turn from the ordinary course of your
studies and your amusements with a discontent that is
not born of failure, and a weariness that is not mere
satiety ? Is it not true that there are times when some-
thing within you cries aloud to be ennobled, and longs
for a voice of command ? Sitting alone, when the day

38 Waymarhs

is done, and the busy round of tasks and amusements
ceases its noisy hum, — when, like a garment, the pres-
sure of things outward falls away from you and leaves
the soul alone, — are there not moments when a A^oice
within you cries : '' Is this the whole of life ? Is there
not somewhere something, nay, some One, with touch
compelling and with voice resistless, who can bid me
rise up out of my meaner self and be a hero for the
right ? Oh for a cause so noble and a leader so sub-
lime that, forgetful of myself, I might go after him, —
seeing in such an one the incarnation of my highest
ideal, and trusting him so utterly that any cost or sacri-
fice incurred in following him would only be a joy ! " Ah,
believe me, my brothers, this inmost hunger of the heart
is not without the bread that was meant to satisfy it.
Over against our soul's cry for the vision of a Divine
Master there stands the form of Him who has come to
make us see that vision.

And this is the meaning and office of that sanctuary
which we consecrate to-day. Not to meet the require-
ments of any mere conventionalism, however vener-
able ; not to erect a tribune where any merely human
eloquence, however commanding, may display itself ;
not to recognize what some one has called the " value
of the religious sentiment as a conservator of social
order," but to make a place for the vision of Jesus
Christ and Him crucified, in His Church, in His Word,
in His Sacraments, — for this, unless 1 have mistaken
utterly the aim of that beneficence which has been
busy here, has tliis building been reared. " Your young

The Young Seer. 39

men shall see visions." Yes, and the one vision of
all others which beholding they shall find themselves
transformed and ennobled by the sight, is the vision of
that Divine Nazarene who loved us and gave Himself
for us, and '' whose pierced hand," as Jean Paul wrote
of it, " has turned the gates of centuries on their hinges,
and opened to us the pathway of an immortal life."
But to see such a vision, nay any vision, w^e must make
a place for it. Crowding our life full all the time of
tasks and pleasures, there is no room for Him to draw
near w^ho will not strive nor cry. Do men ask of us,
" What need is there in this spiritual religion of yours,
as you proclaim it, for visible temples and outward
ordinances and audible worship ? " Precisely, I answer,
that need, only infinitely higher in its degree, that
there is for something visible, something tangible, some-
thing audible which shall express domestic love, and
social beneficence, and civic loyalty, or national patriot-
ism. These are spiritual things, but we take care to
house them fitly and to build our thoughts of them into
grand and stately fabrics. And is the religion of an
incarnate Christ to have no visible incarnation in the
sanctuaries that shall proclaim it ? For myself I am
constrained to say that the poverty and meagreness
with which thus far we have builded in this land for
God is not a thing to be proud of. When the people
lived in cabins it was not incongruous that they should
worship God in a barn. But our great cities are be-
coming cities of palaces, and our marts of trade are
adorned with costliest splendor, while as a rule our

40 Waymarks.

sanctuaries are cheap and, though sometimes preten-
tious, and often tawdry, not solid, not real, not rich, —
in one word, not our best. I am told by those who
know, that the costliest building for its size on this
continent is a building for insuring men's lives. The
satire, if the fact be so, which it suggests is too obvious
to need amplification here. There is a life, and there
is a full assurance of that life, which One alone can
give. What ought to be the temple which we rear for
such a Being, and for the disclosure of such a vision !
Surely, no mean and starved abiding-place befits the
King of Glory.

And so we may well bless God for the unstinted
love and reverence for His honor which have reared
this house, and for her whose heart was moved to build
it. The filial gratitude, the sisterly devotion which
have here expressed themselves have surely chosen
wisely in erecting such a monument to loved ones now
departed. And that which lends, I think you will
agree with me, an especial charm to the gift which is
this day made to God and to this University, is that
it is a gift, for the highest good of young men, from
a woman ; and that even as a woman was honored and
forever ennobled in giving to the race the Saviour
whom we worship here, so a daughter of our Israel
opens to her young brothers within these courts a
place of access to His presence.

May those for whom this holy house is builded often
turn their steps this way ! May they find within these
walls, in psalm and sacrament and sermon, that en-

The Young Seer. 41

iiobling culture which shall strengthen and upbuild
their souls ! May they make a place in each day's life
for this divinest nurture ! And approaching here, in
reverence and awe, may there come forth the quicken-
ing vision of their Lord, until, with those foretold of
old, they too shall cry, " Lo ! this is our God, we have
waited for Him and He will save us ; this is the Lord,
we will be glad and rejoice in His Salvation."

A DEAD PRESIDENT.

Citizens of tlie Republic who lived througti the summer of
A. D. 1881 will never forget it. Ushered in by a traged}'
whose horror and shame made men everywhere in the land
to bow their heads, it was a season of anxious watching
which gathered a whole people about a single couch. On
the 2d day of July the President of the United States,
James Abraham Garfield, while leaving the national capital
on his way to a distant city, w^as shot down in the railway
station by an assassin who had concealed himself in a
waiting-room through which it was known the President
would pass, for that purpose. The wound which the Presi-
dent received was fatal, but not immediately so. On the
contrary, he lingered for several weeks, endured a journey to
the Atlantic coast, and as his symptoms alternated from day^
to day filled the hearts of his countrymen with alternate
hope and dismay. Never was there witnessed in the history
of a great people a more suggestive or pathetic spectacle. A
whole nation was moved by one thought, and touched by one
loyal and tender aspiration. Amid all the passionate ex-
pressions of outraged national dignity and horror, — for,
men everywhere felt the keen shame of the taunt, not
unnaturally provoked by the humiliating fact that within
sixteen years two Presidents of the republic had been
assassinated, which monarchical peoples flung across the
sea, that apparently our freer form of government was no less
unstable and volcanic than their own, — amid all the angry
resentment at the crazy political fanatic, if he was a polit-

A Bead President. 43

ieal fanatic, who had wrought the cruel butchery, there
throbbed a deep undercurrent of steadily broadening sympa-
thy, which prayed, and hoped, and waited, with eager and
passionated steadfastness.

It prayed and hoped in vain. When at length the end
came, it was seen how certain it had been from the begin-
ning. But meanwhile the nation had been educated, first,
in a fine and just appreciation of its suffering mart^'^r, and
then in that habit of patient submission of which he himself
was so rare and noble an illustration. When Garfield died
the Civil War had been ended nearly twenty years. But it
remained for a President chosen by that party with which
the vanquished South was least in sympathy to do more in
bringing into touch the parted hearts of the people of the
two sections than anything which had haj)pened since the
day of Lee's surrender. The assassination of Lincoln fol-
lowed too close upon the defeat of the Confederacy for that.
The passions engendered by the war were too deep to allow
the horror of that calamity to be looked at with other than
large indifference bj^ multitudes of his fellow-countrj^men.
But with Garfield it was different. His rare personal char-
acteristics, his conspicuous magnanimit}' in the treatment of
those hostile to him, his manly resignation in the face of his
bitter fate, — these won to him the farthest as well as the
nearest, and made the closing days of his life memorable
in their record not alone of heroic suffering, but of a beau-
tiful and fraternal sympathy, — a sj-mpathy which rang at
the slightest touch like the tense strings of a liarp, and
which revealed the great soul of a great people as quivering
behind it. The two sermons which follow were preached,
the first on the Prayer Day for the stricken President,
Sept. 11, 1881, and the other on the Sunday following his
death, Sept. 25, 1881.

III.

A NATION'S PRAYERS.

He that planted the ear, shall He not hear ? or He that made
the eye, shall He not see? — Psalm xciv. 9 (Psalter).

There are two ideas of God, which are held to-day by
thinking men of different minds, with equal sincerity
and tenacity.

The one regards Him as a force or power behind
nature, in which it takes its rise or finds its origin.
The school which admits nothing that it cannot demon-,
strate has not thus far, if we are to believe its most
candid teachers, succeeded in demonstrating that life is
self-evolved ; and since this cannot be demonstrated, it is
not unwilling to admit that there may be, somewhere,
some force which, for want of a better name, may be
called God, and in which man as we know him, and
things as we see them, take their rise. But the most
that it is willing to admit concerning this force or
power is that it is a force or power that " makes for
righteousness," — an influence, a tendency, a law if you
please, the result of whose operations is in the direc-
tion of good rather than evil. That this influence, or
tendency, or force, is a Personal Being, — that it is af-
fected by our appeals to it, that it hears a request which

A Nation's Prayers. 45

we make to it, or answers what we call our prayers, —
this it explicitly denies.

And it does so for two reasons : first, that if God be
such a Being as it understands Him to be. He cannot
answer prayer; and then, that as a matter of experience,
He does not. If, in other words, God be simply another
name for law, then it is not of the nature of law to
operate by mere caprice. But that would be caprice,
and not law, which should effect one thing to-day from
its own impulse, and another to-morrow because some-
body asked it to. In fact, however, this impersonal
theory of God is best of all demonstrated (its disciples
maintain) by experience, since experience furnishes no
consistent argument for believing in a personal God who
hears and answers prayer. Observe that the phrase is
'• no consistent argument ; " since the disciple of an im-
personal force or power, as being all that we know as
God, does not deny that there are coincidences between
men's prayers and subsequent events, such as look like
an answer, on the part of the Being to whom those
prayers were addressed, to their requests. But these he
explains by maintaining that they are no more than
coincidences, and that they are offset by innumerable
instances where prayer has been persistently and utterly
disregarded. Ships have gone down in mid-ocean, and
men have cried to God for succor as they never cried
before. But, as with the priests of Baal, crying for
hours together to their God, " 0 Baal, hear us I " so
here, there was " no voice, nor any that answered, nor
any that regarded." Good men have pi-ayed, and prayed

46 Waymarks.

for reasonable things. A parent has asked for his boy,
not wealth, nor eminence, nor cleverness, but only a
sanctified character, and has seen him go down, smitten
and accursed, into a drunkard's grave. A widow has
cried to heaven, not for ease or luxury, but only for her
daily bread, and has been hastened to a premature grave
by the employer who starved and robbed, because he
could not corrupt her. The heavens have seemed as
brass to sufferers who lifted thitherward their prayer
and have seemed to get no answer back. " Let us have
done, then," says the student of all these things, " with
your dogma of a personal God, and most of all with the
notion that He does anything in this world because any
man or woman asks Him to."

And yet, that other school to which I began by refer-
ring will not have done with such a notion, nor refrain
from acting upon it. There are hours in every one's
life when prayer seems almost a mockery, and God
almost a myth. And at such times the arguments
against both which I have referred to seem potent, if
not conclusive. But there are other hours and other
eras, when the conviction of a man or a nation is a very
different one. And this is not because at such a time
one can tabulate statistics which demonstrate God's dis-
position to be influenced by men's prayers, nor because
the difficulty of answering a great many prayers in the
way that a great many people expect them to be an-
swered is not seen and recognized. But at such times
such persons* remember this : that if it be granted that
man is a creature of imperfect knowledge, — that he is

A Nation s Prayers. 47

apt to want a great many things tliat are not good for
him, and that he is apt to want things that are good for
him selfishly, and without regard to the welfare of other
people, — If it be still further true that, in the case of a
child who comes with his petition to you, you serve him
best, oftentimes, by denying, rather than by granting his
request, then, certainly, nothing is proved as against
prayer by insisting that in certain emergencies certain
requests were denied instead of being granted. Said a
missionary bishop once, " Soon after 1 went to my mis-
sionary jurisdiction, 1 wanted twenty thousand dollars,
with which to build five cheap churches in as many
growing towns. Oh, how 1 prayed and prayed for it,
but, thank God, it never came I Yes, thank God ; for
in six months the population of these five mining towns
had moved away, and then I saw that if I had had it the
money would have been simply wasted by me, and that
God knew better than 1 did."

And in that plain and homely sentence there is the
essence of the whole matter. " God knew better" than
the bishop did. Do you suppose he stopped praying,
this missionary bishop, because lie did not get his
twenty thousand dollars ? No, his faith went down a
great deal deeper than that ! He believed first that God
knew, — that is, that He took account of what His ser-
vant was doing for His truth out in those mining towns,
and was interested in it. And it is that conviction, far
more than any visible or particular answer to prayer,
which has been the spring of it ever since the world
began. There are men, as J have said, who believe that

48 Waymarks.

God is a mere force, or law, or soulless tendency. But
there are other men who believe that He is a living
Father, and the strongest argument for that faith they
find, after all, in themselves. There is no more mag-
nificent statement of that argument than we find in the
94th Psalm. It was written in a time of cruel oppres-
sion, when wickedness stalked unabashed in high places,
and when the earlier fear of God had died out from the
breasts of even the rulers of Israel themselves. There
were men who ought to have protected the weak, who
used their power to outrage them. And so David cries
out, telling up this infamy to God, " They smite down
thy people, 0 Lord, and trouble thine heritage. They
murder the widow and the stranger, and put the father-
less to death. And yet they say, ' Tush, the Lord shall
not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it.' "
And then comes that swift reply, which, as Herder has
said, is as pertinent to the faithless philosophy of our
own day as of David's day, " 0 ye fools, when will ye
understand? He that planted the ear, shall He not
hear ? and He that made the eye, shall He not see ? "
You have in yourselves a power that sees and hears.
Where did you get it ? What does it imply, if not that,
somewhere, there is One who hears with an unerring
ear, and sees with an all-searching eye ? Be sure that
whatever comes to pass here in the world, there, is one
Being who sees and knows it all, and w^ho is no indiffer-
ent spectator of the wrongs and sorrows of His children.
Do not forget Him, or leave him out of account ; but
rather remind yourself how your own nature is at once

A Nation's Prayers. 49

the image and witness of His. You see and hear. Be
sure that He, whose child you are, sees and hears you I

It is that larger truth which is implied in these words
of David of which we have lately been having such
interesting evidence in connection with our stricken and
suffering President. A great calamity, with elements
in it which furnish motives for abundant self-scrutiny
and mortification, has brought this people to its knees
with an earnestness and unanimity which are wholly
without a parallel. These last seventy days have been
an era of tender sympathy and earnest prayer, which
will always be memorable and precious. And both
these characteristics are to me an evidence for the be-
ing and character of Him who, as I am profoundly
persuaded, has inspired them.

1. Look, for instance, at the tokens of universal
sympathy. I do not know how it may have been with
most of us, but I think there is more than one here
who must own that he could hardly read that story of
the journey of the President from the capital to the
seaside without a sob in the voice and a mist in the
eye. That long lane of watchers stretching two hun-
dred miles, that lined the way by which he journeyed,
silent, bareheaded, tearful ; the woman who stood in
the station at Wilmington (was it ?), with her babe at
her breast, straining her eyes for one glimpse of that
stricken son of another and more aged mother, and
who, when her child cried, turned instantly away, and,
without a word, vanished out of sight and hearing, lest
even her child's cry should disturb the sufferer; the

4

50 Waymarks.

little fellow at Elberon who asked permission to drive
one spike in the temporary track, that so he too might
share the privilege of smoothing the way for the na-
tion's patient ; the cottager who, when the foreman of
that same track-laying company said to him, " Sir, 1
fear we shall have to carry the track through yonder
flower-bed," answered quickly, '' Carry it through the
house if it will better serve the President I " — these
are but one or two of uncounted and countless evi-
dences of a sympathy so tender, a generosity so eager,
a gracious and beautiful unselfishness which gives one a
new faith in humanity, and makes him prouder of his kind.

2. But there hag been more than sympathy ; there
has been earnest and almost universal prayer. How
are we to explain it ? In a moment of panic on ship-
board, in an earthquake, in the presence of any sudden
and appalling calamity, men will fling themselves upon
their knees, and cry out in an ecstasy of panic and ter-
ror. And under such circumstances, we should hardly
maintain that their conduct was evidence of their faith
in God, or in the power of prayer. Such an act, we
might rightly say, would be apt to be more the fruit
of a blind fear than of sound reason.

But in the case of the country it has been different.
There has been no panic and no sudden danger to indi-
viduals or the nation. If the President were to die
to-morrow, there is no one of us who believes that the
government would go on otherwise than in an orderly
and peaceful way, without the smallest peril to any
single citizen. And yet, in spite of this absence of

A Nation's Prayers. 51

panic, there has been a steadily growing impulse and
tendency toward prayer. These seventy days that have
come and gone have not weakened, they have deepened
it ; and men who have not said a prayer for twenty
years have been seen, during the past week, in the
House of God, and on their knees.

Surely the meaning of all this is not hard to see.
Our own sympathies, by a combination of circumstances
unusual and most impressive, have been appealed to in
a very marked and singular way. The patient and
manly sufferer, the aged mother, the heroic wife, whose
fine fibre, tense as steel and steadfast as a star, is the
stuff of which great nations are made, — these have
combined to elicit a feeling which has been a glory and
beauty to the people in whom it has found expression.
And what is it that has followed upon this sympathy ?
A steadily deepening conviction of God's sympathy.
Men and women have argued from their own softened
hearts up to God's heart. They have said, " If we feel
in this way, how must God feel ? We have a thou-
sand things to make us hard and selfish and indiffer-
ent, that cannot possibly affect Him. And if we are
so drawn together and softened by this common sor-
row, surely it must make its appeal to Him ; and just
because He is our Father, and the President's Father,
and the Father of that vast army of sufferers of whom,
after all, we must not forget the President is not the
chief. He cannot and will not be indifferent."

What is there now which follows inevitably from
this ? Keep in mind all along here, that, in accord-

52 Waymarhs.

ance with the spirit of those words of David with which
we began, we are arguing from our own nature up to
God's. He must have a heart of sympathy, we say,
because our natures are an image of His, and because,
deep in even the most selfish human nature there are
some possibilities of sympathy. Yes, and there is more.
There is an instinct of generous response when our
sympathies are appealed to. There is that — and we
know perfectly well that it is the best and noblest ele-
ment in our nature — which, when another asks help
of us, prompts us to give it ; which, that is to say, when
another prays to us, prompts us to hear his prayer, and
to grant it if we can. But He that made the ear, with
which we hear another's prayer, can He not hear that
prayer when it is addressed to Him ? And He that
made the eye, with which we see another's sorrow,
and feel for it, cannot He, too, see that sorrow, and
feel for it with an infinitely greater tenderness ?

It is thus that those deeper instincts of the human
heart, which witness to the Fatherhood of God and
His sympathy with His children, are, as I read them,
a stronger argument for prayer than any other. We
may stumble amid the seeming contradictions between
prayer and natural laws, or between a predestinating
Providence and the soul's personal cry ; but wider than
all of them — nay, all-inclusive, and all-encompassing —
is the mighty heart of God, to whose paternal conscious-
ness all these seeming contradictions now appear, even
as one day, it may be, they will appear to us, the
veriest dreams of a disordered imagination.

A Nation's Prayers. 53

And so let us thank God that He has given us, in
our own natures, this witness of our right to pray to
Him. As we hear, so, the soul tells us in our doubt-
ing moments, does He who made that with which we
hear no less hearken and listen Himself. There are
moments when, in some darkness, some secret, un-
shared trouble, you cannot speak to any one else. Do
not forget then to speak to Him. Remember that you
are His child, and refuse to live as if you were only
a dumb and voiceless brute.

" For what are men better than sheep or goats,
That nourish a blind life in the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer.
Both for themselves and those who call them friend 1
For so, the whole round world is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God ! "

So has wisely sung a voice which finds an echo in
uncounted hearts. And the words suggest one other
fact which must needs chasten our thankfulness in that
evidence of a nation's faith in the power of prayer
which has lately in so many ways been given to us.
Unless our experience in this community has been
exceptional, the observance of last Thursday was conspic-
uous by the absence of the one class which, of all others,
is the most numerous among us. I mean the working
class. Banks and shops and offices were closed, but so
far as one could see, the day-laborer went as usual to
his toil, and nothing was done to make it easier for him
to find his way into the house of God, or to give him a
chance to pray after he had done so. I do not under-

54 Wai/marks.

take to say whose fault this is, but one thing greatly
needs to be said, and that is that no theory of social
ethics is a sound one which keeps prayer, or opportuni-
ties for prayer, as the privilege of any one class or
caste in the community. If we cannot stop building
and loading and unloading and ploughing and reaping
and digging long enough both to pray ourselves and
let our toiling fellow-man kneel down beside us also,
then we had better not build nor dig at all. Our foun-
dations will be but sand, no matter how deep down
we sink them. A nation which keeps religion or the
offices of religion for any one part of its people, to the
neglect of the rest, has begun to declare that it does
not believe in God at all. For if it did, then it would
remember that any system of religion which leaves out
His neediest and most dependent children, is at once a
mockery and a sham. "The poor crieth and the Lord
heareth him " is a promise which, as I remember it,
is not made in any such general and unqualified terms
to either the rich, the clever, or the respectable.

See to it, then, I beseech you, just, in so far as your
own lot is easier or more privileged than any other,
that you guard the rights of that other to commune
with his Maker and his Saviour. Help other men and
women to pray — the servants who serve you, the
laborer who toils for you, the outcast whose soul no
man cares for, though philanthropy may feed his body
— by keeping sacred for these some hours of approach
to God. In their fnterests, as well as in your own,
guard Sunday from the hands that, upon whatsoever

A Nation's Prayers. 66

pretence, would make it no different from any other
day. You want and they want, believe me, to be
drawn nearer to their unseen Father. These are pros-
perous times, they tell us ; but oh, what sorrow there
must be in human homes when life is held so cheaply,
and when men and women who have not the heart to
face their cheerless future are ending it so soon and
so awfully. What must they think, these poor, be-
nighted ones, of the Father who is over them ? Do
they believe in Him at all ? Do they care to find
Him and to be helped by Him ? And yet, in all their
blind groping and stumbling and falling, they are your
brothers and sisters, and mine, and He who prayed
for them from His cross is praying for them still.

Be it ours to pray for them no less. There are
clouds about our own pathway, it may be, that do not
break or lift. We have prayed for light, and yet it
has not come. Let us think, now and then, if it be
so of those whose way is darker even than our own.
Let us learn not only to pray, but to pray unselfishly
for them ; for so — I know not by what strange alchemy
it is, but, believe me, it is true — so shall we often
find our own doubts hushed, our own fears dispelled,
and our darkness turning into day. Forgetting our-
selves for a little in thought and prayer for others,
we shall find that He whose name is Love has not
forgotten us !

IV.

A NATION'S SORROW.
Blessed art thou, 0 land, when thy king is the son of iiobles !

ECCLESIASTES X. 17.

It is a king himself who writes these words, and whose
ancestry, only a single step backwards, found its root
in a royalty no nobler nor more imperial than a shep-
herd's boy. For Solomon is the preacher here, and the
father of Solomon was David, the shepherd lad of
Bethlehem.

And so, when he writes, " Blessed art thou, 0 land,
when thy king is the son of nobles," we know that in
his thought there is something more and greater than
the mere nobility of rank, or the titled eminence that
comes with ancient and lofty lineage. Such a lineage
is not without its blessings, and it is only a prejudiced
and unintelligent judgment that can despise its value.
If we believe that a pure strain, that courage and en-
durance and a kindly disposition may be passed on by
a horse or a dog, it is a stupid and unreflecting radical-
ism that despises the same principle when it is applied
to men. To be born of noble and kingly parentage
ought to carry with it something of the instincts of
nobility, even if always it does not ; and we republicans

A Nation' 8 Sorrow. 57

do not need to disparage a princely lineage, even
though in dispensing once for all with kings and princes
and nobles and the privileges of inherited rank, we
have found, as we believe, a wiser and " more excellent
way."

But while this is true, it is, as I have implied, of
nobility in some larger and loftier sense that Solomon
is speaking here. Behind all character there are en-
during principles, and it is by these principles, handed
on often from sire to son, but developed for the first
time sometimes by him in whom they are illustrated,
that greatness is nurtured, and the truest kingship
achieved. We see, now and then, men of the humblest
lineage, as the world reckons such things, who mount
to the loftiest eminence from lowliest and most obscure
beginnings, and we see all along, in the history of such
men, certain dominant aspirations, certain clear convic-
tions, a faith and courage and majesty of rectitude,
which rule and mould them from the beginning. Such
men, whatever their origin, seem to be born of great
truths and nurtured by grand ideas. In the womb of
these their intellects were nourished, their wills disci-
plined, and their consciences enlightened. If we go
back to the mothers who bore them, no matter in what
humble station they lived and toiled and nourished
their little ones, the same noble qualities appear, and
these are the influences that rule and mould the man.
Such a man, in whatever high station he stands, is great
and noble, because he is, most of all, the son of noble
beliefs and noble convictions.

58 Waymarhs.

It is such a man that this nation mourns to-day, and
whose memory we honor, not merely nor only because
he was President, but because kinglier than his official
position, more royal than his ancestry or lineage, noble
and heroic as is the mother who bore him, was the man
himself. And of him I would speak this morning, not
so much in a strain of grief, nor with the thought of our
common bereavement, as in thankfulness to the Provi-
dence who gave him to us, and in gratitude for the
benediction of his example. With a wise appropriate-
ness the Church and the State unite in calling us to-
morrow to a day of humiliation and fasting and prayer.
Our past as a nation is not so stainless that we do not
need to humble ourselves. Our present is not so cloud-
less nor so aspiring that we do not need both to disci-
pline and ennoble it by fasting. Our future is not so
secure that we may not wisely and earnestly pray for a
loftier guidance and a more unerring wisdom than our
own. But, meantime, the life and work of our dead
President are completed, and as the nation watches
round his bier, every citizen in it of kin to him who is
gone in this common grief of ours, and every man,
woman, and child a mourner, let us gather the lessons
of a royal life, and bless God to-day that our dead king
was the son of nobles.

Happily, our theme for these few moments is bounded
and circumscribed by this place and this hour. It is
not mine to speak of Mr. Garfield as a teacher, a man
of letters, a soldier, or a statesman. Nor am I called
to sketch the romance of his swift and sure ascent.

A Nation's Sorrow. 59

with no step backward in it all, from the tow-path to
the White House. These are aspects of his history
which will get abundant recognition elsewhere, and
which are in no danger of being lost sight of in the
eulogy of the forum nor the pages of books and news-
papers. But, howsoever worthy of commemoration they
biay be, — and most surely they belong to the history of
our time, and of this people, — they are largely foreign
to those interests and truths for which the pulpit exists
to witness, and with which it should chiefly be con-
cerned. In this place, at any rate, it is of moment to
ask, not how high a man climbed, nor from whence ; not
how many offices he held, nor how soon he grasped
them ; not even how much learning adorned him, nor
how gracefully he used it; but behind and within all
this scaffolding of outward activities, how grew the man
himself ? What of his character in its inmost fibre
and quality ; not what did he do, but what did he
come to be, and how ? What of the Godward side of
the man, — that side of every man which was made
to reach out and up, — his moral nature, his faith in
the unseen, his wealth in that kind of character which,
when we come to open the pages of the New Testament,
seems oftenest to confront us there. It is of these
aspects of the life and work of our dead President
that I would speak to-day. In other words, I would
recall this morning, and this morning bless God for,
his good example : (1) of fidelity ; (2) of manly Chris-
tian faith ; and then (3) of Christian heroism and
patience.

60 Waymarks,

1. Says the great apostle to the Gentiles, writing
to the church at Corinth, '' It is required in stewards
that a man be found faithful ; " and when Saint John is
gathering up for our instruction those wonderful echoes
of the Apocalyptic vision which came to him on Pat-
mos, he is bidden to write, " Be thou faithful unto
death, and I will give thee a crown of life." What
a faithful life it was that breathed itself out at Elberon
last Monday ! That story of the orphan lad fighting
his way through every difficulty ; first to an education,
and then to eminence in three distinct vocations,
teacher, soldier, statesman, and genuinely great in all
of them, — what is there in it that so much enlists us
as its fidelity ? There are men who advance to emi-
nence borne on from the outset by gifts of genius and
force of will, which make distinction inevitable. But
the ruler whom we have lost was in no sense a man
of genius, and had a nature as gentle and considerate
as a woman's. He did not climb up simply by thrust-
ing others down, and he did not achieve without the
strain and toil of brave and faithful endeavor. In a
sketch of him from the pen of an Englishman, there
occurs an incident which, until I read it there, was new
to me, and which I venture to recall here, though to
some of you it may be familiar, because it illustrates
so aptly this special quality of General Garfield's hab-
itual fidelity : —

At an early period in our late war, the State of Ken-
tucky was threatened with invasion by a large body of
Confederate troops, who had in fact, some five thousand

A Nation's Sorrow. 61

of them, already crossed its eastern border. In Decem-
ber, Colonel Garfield (as he then was) was ordered to
report himself and his regiment to General Buell, at
Louisville. The historian of the Forty-second Regiment
relates his interview with Buell and the result. In the
evening Colonel Garfield reached Louisville and sought
General Buell at his headquarters. He found a cold,
silent, austere man, who asked a few direct questions,
revealed nothing, and eyed the new-comer with a curious,
searching expression, as though trying to look into the
untried Colonel and see whether he w^ould succeed or
fail. Taking a map, General Buell pointed out the posi-
tion of Marshall's forces in Eastern Kentucky, marked
the locations in which the Union troops in that district
were posted, explained the nature of the country, and
then dismissed his visitor with this remark : " If you
were in command of the sub-department of Eastern
Kentucky, what would you do ? Come here to-morrow
at nine o'clock, and tell me." Colonel Garfield returned
to his hotel, procured a map of Kentucky, the last Cen-
sus Report, paper, pen, and ink, and sat down to his
task. He studied the roads, resources, and population of
every county in Eastern Kentucky. At daylight he was
still at work, and had been at work all night; but at
nine o'clock in the morning he was at headquarters with
a sketch of his plans. Having read the paper carefully.
General Buell made it the basis of an immediate order,
placing Garfield in command of a brigade of four regi-
ments of infantry and a battalion of cavalry, and ordered
him, to Eastern Kentucky to expel Marshall's force in his

62 Way7narhs.

own way. The result of this appointment Was the battle
of Mill Creek, the first victory gained by the Union
troops in that part of the country, and this by men
inferior in numbers to the troops to whom they were
opposed, and who had never before been under iire.

The significance of such an incident as this is larger
than at first appears. It is the eternal law that he who
has been faithful over a few tilings shall be made ruler
over many things ; and it was here the fidelity in the
immediate task which opened the way for those larger
honors and responsibilities that lay beyond it. To do
that task well, nay, best, — not to slight it, nor to shirk
it, — to turn on the problem given him to solve every
light at his command, and then to sit up all night
working at its solution, this revealed a manhood whose
strongest instinct, nay, whose settled habit had come
to be fidelity. Think back, now, along the earlier his-
tory of the young soldier (for he w^as then scarce thirty
years of age), and remember by what earlier fidelity
that habit had been strengthened and disciplined. To
do his duty, and to do it with his whole heart, this seems
to have been the eager purpose of boy and man alike.

And so it came to pass that other men trusted and
leaned upon him. He never addressed himself to any
question without doing his best to master it, and the
thoroughness with which he wrought has been one of his
characteristics which has, 1 think, been but partially
and imperfectly appreciated. He was not an elegant
scholar, and little inaccuracies of his in a Latin quota-
tion, for instance, have led some of us to smile at the

A Nation's Sorrow. 63

claim which others made for him of eminent culture.
But he had something better than the learning of mere
technical accuracy or literary nicety , he had the learn-
ing which reveals that a man has mastered what he is
talking about. His financial speeches are a striking
illustration of this, disclosing a knowledge of the history
of finance in older nations which is equally rare and
valuable. But he only got this, as alone he got other
things, by digging for them. He had a ready command
of words, but they were worth listening to because he
had packed into them the result of long-continued and
painstaking assiduity. And hence it was that honors
sought him, and larger burdens were given him to bear.
It did not matter what task was assigned to him ; no
sooner was he called to it than it became a trust, and he
himself a steward who must give account.

I take it, this is the practical difference between those
who do the work of life and those who fail to do it.
Make every allowance that utmost charity can claim for
feeble powers and narrow brains and broken health and
inherited disabilities, and the fact remains that the world
divides itself into the faithful and the faithless, — those
who face their work and those who evade it. And so,
at last, when the account is made up and the verdict
pronounced, it runs, " Well done, good and " — not
good-natured, or eloquent, or well-meaning, but — "Well
done, good and faithful servant."

2. In President Garfield this fidelity was united to —
ought I not rather to say it was rooted in — a manly and
courageous Christian faith. A manly and courageous

64 Waymarks.

Christian faith, I say ; for there were features in the relig-
ious life of our late Chief Magistrate which were in many
respects exceptional. It is not uncommon for public men
to be, at any rate, nominal Christians, and to indicate
their belief by at least acquiescence in Christian usages
and traditions. But in General Garfield there was some-
thing more than acquiescence in something more than a
tradition. He belonged to a communion whose name
was by the great majority of people unknown until they
heard it in connection with him, and whose tenets and
fellowship were alike obscure. It was a communion ut-
terly without prestige either of numbers, wealth, or influ-
ence. A man may be proud to be of the Methodists or
Baptists, because they are so numerous, or to be of the
Presbyterians, because they are so orthodox and respect-
able, or to be a Churchman, because it is so historic, or a
Unitarian, because they are so clever ; but to be a mem-
ber of that little and obscure sect that called itself the
Church of the Disciples, with its brief history and sim-
ple rites, and meagre and homely brotherhood, there
was no distinction in that, but rather something which,
to superficial minds, might seem to border upon the
reverse. And so it was to the honor of the President
that all along he clung to that earlier fellowship in
which, in the first flush of his opening manhood, he had
found his way into the enkindling fellowship of his
Master and Saviour. In that humble communion there
seem to have been good men who strongly influenced his
childhood and youth alike. He never forgot them. He
turned to them all along, with deepening reverence and

A Nation's Sorrow, 65

gratitude ; and his love for his Bible, his habit of getting
wisdom and strength for each day's duties on his knees,
which he had early learned of these men, these, too, he
never forgot nor outgrew. It is the vice of our American
manhood that in matters of religion it is so often so fur-
tive and secretive. We are ashamed to be seen reading
a good book, and, most of all, to be seen reading the
best book. A merchant who should keep a copy of the
two Testaments at his elbow would be thought, by many
people, a fanatic or a Pharisee. And yet he would find
better advice in either of them, often, than he would get
from the most learned treatise on banking or the most
profound disquisition on laws of exchange. Has it ever
occurred to us why there has been such rare earnest-
ness and reality in all our praying for the President ?
Though we have not been conscious of it, I am per-
suaded that it has been because, in the common heart
and thought of the people, there has been the deep sub-
consciousness that he for whom they were praying
believed in prayer himself, and that while they were
asking God to heal him, he himself was trying every
hour to say, in the spirit of that Master who said it
Himself, and who taught us all to say it, Not as I will
but as Thou wilt : Thy will be done !

3. And this brings me naturally and obviously to
speak of that last trait in the leader whom we have lost,
which, as I think, it belongs to us in this place pre-
eminently to recall. It has been said that if the Presi-
dent had died on the day that he was shot down by the
assassin's hand, the outburst of indignation would have

5

66 Waymarks.

been far fiercer, but that the feeling elicited would have
been alike more ephemeral and more circumscribed. It
is not difficult to see why. Never was there a nobler
triumph of the grace of patience than in this man.
There is a great deal that seemed trivial or insignificant
at the time that it happened, which now, looking back
on it, we can estimate at its true worth. The play-
ful greeting with which he welcomed his friends to
the sick-chamber, the cheery word or look, that at the
time we took for tokens how much less grave was the
emergency than we dreaded, — ah, how different they
all read now ! To bear pain is hard enough, and men
who can be brave in danger, and can endure without
a quiver some brief operation, are apt to break down
very soon in those long stretches of suffering which
women have oftener to bear than men, and which they
bear usually so much better. But here was a sufferer
whose patience and courage were co-equal. Remember
what message he sent from his sick room to the wife
who was hastening to his side : " The President is
wounded — how seriously he cannot tell. He asks
that you should come to him, and sends you his love."
No note of panic, no half savage shriek of command, —
innate dignity, sweetness, self-control, tenderest thought
for another. And so it was all along. When they
lifted him into the car at Washington, some awkward
hand jarred the stretcher against the doorway. A pang
of intense pain flashed its brief signal across the face
of the sufferer, ^ — how keen a sufferer we know, now
that we have read the story of that pierced and shattered

A Nation's Sorrow, 67

spine, — but no more — no word of impatience or com-
plaint. And later on, when the wasted invalid is lifted
for a brief vision of the sea — fit symbol of that wider
ocean on which iie was so soon to launch — as the
passing sentinel, catching a glimpse of the President,
straightway salutes his commander-in-chief, the old
instinct of courtesy carries the shadowy hand to the
visor, and once more the brave and patient sufferer
forgets himself. Ah I my brothers^ this sweet and
steady self-command I this tireless and heroic patience I
— these were the noblest of all. We lift our eyes from
that sick bed to the cross of One who was once wounded
and who suffered for us all. And it is the same spec-
tacle of patient and uncomplaining suffering that at
once wins and conquers us there. To do, that were
indeed noble if there were nothing nobler in life. But
to bear, to lie still and patiently endure, that is grander
still.

And so we thank God to-day for that good example
of this His servant, who has finished a course so heroic.
Fidelity in duty, faith in Christ, and patience in suffer-
ing, — surely these are the elements out of which the
most lasting greatness is builded. Blessed, thrice
blessed, 0 land, whose king is the son of such nobili-
ties as these. Kingly verily he was who could prove
his right to rule by gifts so royal as these. Who shall
say that they or he have done their glorious work ? As
we stand to-day and look down into that open grave
where to-morrow he is to be laid amid the tears and
lamentations of fifty millions of people, who shall say

68 Way marks.

that his kingly work is ended ? That vigorous intellect,
those generous sympathies, that patient courage, that
simple and reverent faith, — are all these forever hushed
and stilled ? As the low-browed portal swings upon
its hinges, does it open upon nothing beyond ? " And
I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as
the voice of many waters, and as the sound of mighty
thunderings, saying. Alleluia ; for the Lord God omnipo-
tent reigneth I And one answered me saying. What are
these which are arrayed in white raiment, and whence
come they ? And I said unto him. Sir, thou knowest. And
he said unto me. These are they which came out of great
tribulation." The long fight is ended. The bitterness
of death is passed. Standing some of them in low
places and some of them in high ones, bearing their
burden, doing their task, owning their Lord, they have
toiled and striven and endured, and so have fallen
asleep. And therefore, tarrying but a little in their
earthly resting-places, they stand, at last, before the
throne of God ; they serve Him day and night in His
temple, and " He that sitteth on the throne shall dwell
among them." No pang can touch them now. '' They
shall hunger no more ; neither thirst any more ; neither
shall the sun light on them ; nor any heat. For the
Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed
them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of
waters ; and God shall wipe away all tears from their
eyes."

PREFATORY TO NEW YORK MERCHANTS.

The history of the city of New York would be very im-
perfectly written if it did not include some record of a class
of men whose names have rarely been conspicuous for civic
place, or in the realm of art, or letters, or science. It has
often been described, as though it were to its disparagement,
as a commercial city, and undoubtedly that has been its
conspicuous distinction. But that it has been a ver}^ noble
and honorable distinction is best known by those whose
privilege it has been to watch the career of men eminent in
business and finance who have brought to the large and
difficult problems of the commerce of two hemisi^heres gifts
which would have made them distinguished in any calling,
and which, best of all, have been exercised, from first to last,
without one taint of duplicity or dishonor. The financial
history of any great city is inevitably a history of financial
crises, and of the rise and fall of great enterprises, great
houses, and strong and commanding personalities. Some
of these are included within the period covered by this
volume, and the inner history of them has become known to
those who in the pastoral relation have enjoyed the confi-
dence of merchants, bankers, and other men of business who
were their ^larishioners.

The two sermons which follow commemorate men of this
class. Both of them were largely identified in every best
way with what may be truly called the higher history of
New York; both of them were the stewards of large means;
and both of them knew something, one of them exceptionally

70 Waymarks.

much, of the vicissitudes of commercial life in an American
financial centre. It is interesting to recall them now, after
the lapse of nearly a quarter of a century since they came
into official relations with the city rector who desires here to
commemorate their virtues. Both of them enjoyed the singu-
lar felicity of an intimate friendship with much the most
picturesque and original figure in the history of our American
Christianity; I mean the late Dr. Muhlenberg, a man who
achieved during his lifetime the unique distinction of being
the father of the Church School movement, the Free Church
movement, and the Church Hospital movement, and also the
founder of that interesting experiment in Christian social-
ism, with which as his generous helpers, both Mr. John
David Wolfe and Mr. Adam Norrie were associated, known
as St. Johnland.

It would not be easy to estimate how much Dr. Muhlen-
berg's influence had to do in educating the sympathies
and widening the vision of these two men. But behind the
aptitudes to see and feel, there were in both of them those
sturdy bases of character, unbending integrity, incorrupt-
ible honesty, and a devout and reverent soul, which formed
the foundation for all the superstructure of conduct and
service that through long years lifted itself increasingly
into the recognition and respect of their fellows. They
were, both of them, merchant princes in the best sense, —
men of princely ideas in the realm of all noble doing, and
of princely beneficence in the illustration of those ideas.
Men come and go in the marts of commerce, but the memory
of such men remains, an enduring fragrance through all the
dusty highways of commercial life. •

The first of the sermons that follow was preached in Grace
Church, New York, on Sunday, May 26, 1789, and the
second in the same place on Sunday, Nov. 12, 1882.

V.

SERMOX COMMEMORATIVE OF JOHN
DAVID WOLFE.

And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made
great lamentation. — Acts viii. 2.

This was something more than a conventional funeral.
The people among whom it occurred were given to
burial rites of elaborate and studied ceremonial. Like
all orientalists, their mourning was chiefly marked by
a painstaking and intentional publicity. It sought the
general gaze, and not content with the cries and tears
of friends, it hired professional mourners, with whom
the dramatic exhibition of feeling was a trade, and who
were, in the expressive language of the writer of the
Book of Ecclesiastes, " skilled in lamentation." Nothino;
could mark more strongly the wide difference between
the social customs of oriental nations and our own than
the usages of the burial of the dead. With us, demon-
strations of mere emotion on such occasions are at once
unusual and unlooked for ; but among the Aryan and
Semitic races alike, grief, whether actual or simulated,
was demonstrative, and even boisterous and obtrusive.
Wide apart as were the Greeks and the Egyptians, and

72 Way marks.

widely as were the Hebrews distinguished, both by
their religion and their customs, from either, these
three great and representative peoples of the elder world
were almost identical in the usages of their mourning.
With all of them, grief for the dead meant baring
and beating the breast, sprinkling or sitting in ashes,
songs of lamentation, and the employment of mourning
women.

And so, when the martyred Stephen is buried, the
customs are not changed. True, he was not merely a
Jew, but a Christian ; yet the infant church still clung
to the cherished ceremonies of the elder, and what was
usual was followed here. It was indeed the hatred and
vindictiveness of Judaism which had slain this godly
man ; yet, when he is dead, the manner of his burial
is the usage of Judaism itself. To have changed it
would have been to have surrendered his claim as a
veritable and loyal Israelite ; and doubtless, also, to
have grieved and wounded his surviving relatives. All
the more because his death had been so cruel and
distressing, would they have his burial decent and
reverent and painstaking ; even as when the nation
buries some honored soldier she surrounds his funeral
cortege with every element of pomp and state and
ceremony, as though she would atone for the hardships
of his bitter and lonely end upon the field of battle by
utmost tenderness and reverence in dealing with his
lifeless body.

And thus it was with the bruised and mangled form
of Stephen. The funeral order of his race was care-

Commemorative of John David Wolfe. 73

fully observed. There were not wanting trains of
mourners, a funeral escort, nor the tones of loud-voiced
lamentation. Everything that mere custom demanded
seems to have been scrupulously and painstakingly
observed.

But there was this difference, — and it comes out
with a singular and touching significance in two Greek
words, used here only in all the New Testament: the
mourning at Stephen's funeral was the mourning of
unaffected feeling, and the attendants who followed
him to his grave were not hired mutes nor paid mourn-
ers, but grief-stricken and godly men. I presume that
every slightest ceremony that Judaism, with its elabo-
rate ritual, demanded, Avas performed without an omis-
sion. But no careless or perfunctory hands touched
the martyr's scarred and shattered form, and " devout
men," who knew and loved the saint and hero sleeping
in his blood-stained shroud, "made great lamentation
over him."

Such a scene at once suggests the thought of the
difference that there is in funerals. The Church of
which we are members, unlike the Christian bodies
about her, follows the usage of the elder Church in
having one common ritual for all her baptized dead.
She does not attempt to discriminate either in her
customs or her utterances. All who die within her pale
are buried with the same Office, and have said over
them the same incomparable words. She is not a
judge, with such infallible insight that she can weigh
character and prophesy of destiny. There are some

74 Waymarks.

of us who deplore that "liturgical stiffness," as it is
called, which leaves no room for the play of individual
pastoral utterance in our funeral customs, and affords
no opportunity for converging the general lines of
thought and emotion appropriate to the occasion to
the individual case or character. But the candid testi-
mony of those who enjoy such liberty, and who are free
to conduct the funeral offices of religion unreservedly at
their own discretion, is almost unanimous in declaring
the exercise of that discretion to be at once painful,
embarrassing, and in its results very often, most unfor-
tunate. Where prayer and hymn and eulogy are left
free to be ordered by the supposed demands of every
individual instance, they will be very apt to become
presumptuous in their condemnation, or else unreal in
their praise. The minister of Christ becomes either a
judge or a eulogist, and the congregation before him
are apt to be a jury of critics rather than an assemblage
of mourners. On the one hand are those whose grief
makes them eager for commendations, the want of
which breeds resentment if they are not spoken ; while
on the other are those whose less interested but per-
haps not less prejudiced judgments denounce or deride
such commendations, if they are.

Most wisely, therefore, does the Church use one com-
mon Office for all her dead, leaving scarce any discretion
to her ministry, and uttering one uniform voice to her
people. Her language is general, not specific. She
writes as Inspiration has written before her, " Blessed
are the dead who die in the Lord ; " but she utters no

Commemorative of John David Wolfe. 75

verdict of application in connection with their use. She
speaks words of Christian hope ; but they are coupled
with the Scriptural conditions of all Christian hope. Hers
is not a heathen, but a Christian burial ; and its lan-
guage, as Dr. Vaughan has admirably said, in defending
the English burial service, is language which, said, as it
only can be said, over a baptized disciple of Christ,
" ought to be true of such an one, if it is not. " In a
word, it is the language of Christian faith and trust ; and
while it is utterly devoid of any specific application of
its very general terms, we feel that its tone is only what
the tone of anything save a heathen burial ought to be.

And yet, when we come to use it, we recognize, as I
have already intimated, what a really tremendous differ-
ence thei'e may be in even the Church's funerals. As
with Stephen's burial by the elder Church, there are the
same preliminaries, the same customs, the same words,
and yet, as there, there may be the widest and most
radical difference in what those words and customs ex-
press. Have we not all witnessed funerals Avhere even
the sublime ritual of the Church seemed powerless to
touch the heart or lift the thoughts ? The pathetic
words of prophetic confidence, of divine assurance, of pa-
tient acquiescence, the incomparable argument, the
pleading entreaty, the hopeful committal, the fervent
thanksgiving, have alike fallen upon the ear, only to
leave behind them a sense of ghastly and painful incon-
gruity. Christian symbols stood around ; flowers, cun-
ningly fashioned into emblems of faith and hope,
bloomed upon the bier, but all the while our thoughts

76 . Way marks.

have been full of their utter meaninglessness. The
trumpet tones of that grand demonstration of the doc-
trine of the resurrection which Saint Paul pours forth in
his epistle to the church at Corinth fall upon our hear-
ing, but in vain. With utmost charity, with every will-
ingness to leave the vanished life in the hands of a Love
at once deeper and wiser than ours, we cannot bind that
life and the Church's tones together. Somehow, they do
not fit into, and form a part of, each other. Verily,
" Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord ; for they
rest from their labors." But if they have not lived in
the Lord, nor labored for Him — We may say these
questions are useless ; but we cannot help asking
them.

On the other hand, there are other funerals where we
use precisely the same ritual ; where there is no diversity
in usage or custom from what is wonted, unless it be
in the direction of greater simplicity ; where merely the
Church's appointed words are said, and no others, and
yet where the emotions of our own hearts and the very
atmosphere of the whole occasion are utterly and wholly
different. There is deep and wide-spread sorrow, but
it is a grief gilded with light. We listen to the words
of inspired hope and promise, and, as we lift our eyes
from the bier before us, lo ! the clouds are parted, and
we see how, to a Christian, the grave is only a low-
browed portal, through which, bending as he passes,
he emerges into larger life and freer. The Apostle's
words, in that which forms the Church's burial Lesson,
are no longer a mere argument, a piece of dialectic skill ;

Commemorative of John David Wolfe. 11

they are a heaven-inspired prophecy and revelation ,
and, mounting step by step in thought with him as
he advances, we cry at last, in his own words, even
out of the valley of our bitter grief, " Thanks be to
God, for death is swallowed up in victory 1 " Such a
funeral service has taken place within these walls
since we last gathered here, and was marked by
features so signal and exceptional, that to fail to
note them would be to miss the significance of one of the
most suggestive assemblages which these walls have ever
embraced. 1 have seen children belonging to public
institutions present on such occasions, when a benefactor
had been called away ; but 1 never before saw little chil-
dren weeping for the death of one who in age stood at a
remove from them of all but four-score years. I have
seen the clergy gathered to do honor to men in public
life ; but I do not think I ever saw so large a body of the
clergy, of every shade of opinion, gathered in attendance
upon the funeral of a layman who never left the most
retired walks of private life. I have seen institutions of
charity largely represented on such occasions ; but I
doubt whether there have been many occasions in the
entire history of this community where representatives
of such varied and diverse enterprises, homes and ref-
uges, hospitals and asylums, museums of art and science
and literature, schools and shelters and colleges, nay,
the friends of the dumb brute even, as well as of neg-
lected or over-driven human beings, were gathered in
such numbers, or with such unmistakable evidences of
feeling.

78 Waymarhs.

Why was it ? Was it because he to whom I now
refer was a rich man ? On the contrary, rich men are
no novelty nor rarity in New York ; and whatever may
be the respect which mere wealth inspires while its
possessor is living, we all know that nothing is more
powerless to secure the genuine and unbought homage
of love when he is dead. We are said to be great wor-
shippers of money in America ; but it is at once an in-
structive and a cheering fact that the mere possession of
money alone goes but a very little way to endear its
possessor to the esteem and regard of his kind. Rich
men die in our great cities every day, and dying,

" Vanish out of sight
And are forgotten ; "

but here was a private citizen whose wealth was not
greater than that of many others around him, and yet
the sense of whose loss, betraying itself as it did in the
exceptional and almost pathetic character of his obse-
quies, will, I venture to declare, go on deepening and
increasing as the days and months go by.

Again I ask. Why was it ? It will be answered more
confidently and more generally perhaps, "- Because it
was not merely the loss of one intrusted with wealth,
but the loss of one who freely gave of that wealth to
every good and Christ-like cause ; one who scattered his
benefactions with a royal hand, and who knew no stint
in the measure of his gifts, or the range of their
objects. "

And as a partial explanation of so wide-spread and un-
wonted a sense of bereavement, this is undoubtedly true.

Commemorative of John David Wolfe. 79

Mr. John David Wolfe was a man of catholic benevo-
lence, and of wide-reaching and comprehensive gifts.
Some men, situated as he was, would have touched the
great circle of religious and philanthropic charities
strongly, but at a few points. He never did anything
penuriously ; but at the same time his range was al-
most boundless. If he had " pet " charities, they did
not shut others, less engaging or less romantic, from out
the range of his vision. He saw with as vivid a discern-
ment the claims of the cause of Christ on the coast of
Cape Palmas as he saw the needs of neglected and un-
taught children in our own crowded streets.

And yet it was something more than the profuseness
or catholicity of his charities which so greatly endeared
him to others when living, and which makes him so
unaffectedly lamented now that he is dead. It was
rather the rare and happy combination in him of great
practical wisdom, of habitually sound discrimination, of
a warm and generous and sympathetic heart, with untir-
ing activity in carrying out its impulses. His benefac-
tions were freighted with good-will, and his habitual
liberality won its choicest perfume from the personal
interest, and constant and painstaking anxiety for the
welfare and succor of others, which always and every-
where went with it. I doubt whether any other man in
the community gave so much time to visits among our
public and private institutions of charity as did he ; and
I certainly have not been privileged to meet any one
who was so thorouo^hlv at home among; them. He knew
almost every physician, nurse, attendant, and, in many

80 Wat/marks.

institutions, even their patients. When he entered such
homes for destitute childhood as St. Barnabas' House
or the Sheltering Arms, the shouts of welcome that
greeted him, and the thronging of little ones about him
was a spectacle never to be forgotten. It was a devo-
tion unpurchasable by money, and it was the only thing
that 1 ever greatly envied him. Children intuitively
and instinctively recognized and loved him, and their
faces reflected the tenderness and benignity that shone
upon them from his own, with a warmth and kindliness
that could not be mistaken. I owe to him, almost ex-
clusively, my personal knowledge of the charities of
New York ; and, as 1 remember how it was his custom
to go among them, especially on seasons so exclusively
devoted, ordinarily, to private festivity as Christmas and
Thanksgiving day, I do not wonder that one who knew
and valued him most warmly said to me the other day,
" We have no one to take his place among the children."

It was this same spirit of warm, personal interest, and
of painstaking and discriminating charity, which marked
his benefactions when they took a wider range. More
than any other layman in the whole history of our
American Church, Mr. Wolfe was concerned in laying
its broad and deep foundations in our distant West.

The dioceses of Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Iowa,
Utah, Nevada, and Oregon owe more to his gifts and
personal interest than to those of any other layman. In
some of them, almost the whole educational structure of
the diocese was his exclusive work. Here at home this
was but little known, for Mr. Wolfe's benefactions were

Commemorative of John David Wolfe. 81

as free from ostentation as they were princely in meas-
ure ; but the missionary bishops of this Church have
sustained a loss in his departure which is simply and
utterly irreparable. 1 dread to hear the cry of grief and
dismay which I know is already on the way to me from
those far-distant frontiers. The valiant hearts that are
fighting there, almost single-handed, for the Master, will
know no keener pang than that which has come to them
with the tidings that their friend and fellow-worker is
no more.

For it was because, as I have already implied, he was
so truly this last, that he will be most of all missed. It
is a very interesting, and to me a very precious fact,
that, while Mr. Wolfe had very strong and decided con-
victions of his own on all points of Church doctrine and
polity, this did not exclude from his sympathy and in-
terest men who often widely differed from him, so long
as they were men, and men in earnest. He was not
hasty in his judgments, nor impulsive in his confidences ;
but when he was once persuaded that a missionary
bishop or presbyter was honestly working for Christ,
and when he saw that the opening was a good one, it
was, with him, enough. He exercised the same pru-
dence in making a charitable investment that he did in
making a business investment, and the schools and
churches which he reared now stand in flourishing pros-
perity to witness at once to his wisdom and his liberal-
ity. His correspondence was large and various, and he
kept himself constantly informed of the interests of the
church of Christ and Christian education on our most

6

82 Way marks.

distant outposts. Who can wonder that he made him-
self widely felt, or that, now that he is gone, he will be
widely and sorely missed ?

One of the most interesting illustrations of his wis-
dom and discrimination, in co-operating in the mis-
sionary work of the Church, is to be found in a little
pamphlet known as the " Mission Service," a compilation
made and published by himself, and issued in English,
French, German, Italian, and Spanish. For twenty
years the Church has been discussing the question
whether it could safely allow its ministers some slight
liberty in modifying the order or abbreviating the length
of her services, and up to this day has, with a timidity
and stiffness which do her little honor, practically re-
fused such liberty. Mr. Wolfe, with a courage and
practical good sense which were alike worthy of the emer-
gency, cut the Gordian knot by himself preparing and
printing such an abbreviated service. I have ne^^r yet
heard of any bishop or presbyter who refused to give it
practical approval by making use of it; and among those
who have demanded it most eagerly, in their missionary
operations, have been some of the most unbending
churchmen, whether prelates or presbyters, in the land.
Hundreds of thousands of copies of it have been scat-
tered from Maine to New Mexico, educating strangers
to her fold to love and long for the prayers of the
Church, and to accept thankfully and reverently a fuller
ritual, when at length it could be permanently provided
for them.

I may not, within these limits,. undertake to speak of

Commemorative of John David Wolfe. 83

Mr. Wolfe as I should wish to, in his relations to this
parish, and I d|^re not trust myself to speak of him as I
would, in his more intimate relations to myself. The
senior officer of Grace Parish, he was its faithful and
unswerving friend and servant for more than a quarter
of a century. A member of its vestry when the present
edifice was erected, his connection with that body con-
tinued, without interruption, until the day of his death ;
and it is but a few weeks since he came to me to submit
a plan for the future of the parish, which showed how
alive he was to the importance of rightly shaping that
future, though he could not hope to share in it himself.
A man of four- score years, he yet took an active and dis-
criminating interest in every living question, and in his
relations to the vestry of this church, as well as out of
it, he was singularly free from that coldly retrospective
conservatism which settles torpidly upon the lees of the
past, and is equally indifferent to the wants of the pres-
ent and the exigencies of the future. Above all, he was
distinguished by an unswerving loyalty to the interests
of the parish, and to every least obligation which his
official connection with it involved ; and the harmony
and unanimity of official action which have long been
the rare and honorable distinction of the corporation
found in him one of the happiest and most steadfast
illustrations. If I or others differed from him at any
time concerning certain lines of parochial policy it
never, for one moment, made him obstructive in his
action, or cold or reserved in his bearing. He never
took advantage of his official position to seek to coerce

84 Waymarhs.

the judgment or action of others ; and where he could
not approve a certain course himself, he acquiesced
promptly and cheerfully in the prevailing opinion of
those with whom he was associated.

If 1 were to attempt to speak of him as I knew him
personally, I would have to trench upon the privacy of
his home, and to speak of some things almost too sacred
for utterance. But I may at least venture to declare
that all that was best and most ena-aoinff in him was
deepened and consecrated by the grace of the Gospel
of Christ. He was a consistent and devout disciple of
the Master, and his reverent bearing here in this holy
house, and his godly walk and conversation elsewhere,
were too clear and unequivocal in their testimony to be
mistaken. Not naturally impulsive or emotional in his
temperament, an eager business man for many years
of his life, the grace of Christ so wrought upon him
as steadily to enlai'ge his kindly heart, and open, more
and more widely, his generous and untiring hand ; and
when at last he lay down to die, his thoughts were
still busy with schemes of good for others, and almost
his last words to me were concerning those schemes
and his own earnest desire for their speedy realization,
"xind so he fell asleep, and was not, for God took
him."

Who among us will not bless God for a life so beauti-
ful and benignant ? Men of wealth, young men whose
earnest and hourly ambition it is that you may be men
of wealth, see in such a life, I pray you, the portraiture
of a Christian stewardship. We may pile up vast and

Commemorative of John David Wolfe. 85

exceptional fortunes, we may startle other men, alike by
the boldness and by the success of our business ventures ;
we may excel ever so conspicuously in the mad race
for gain and moneyed precedence, sacrificing rest and
health and strength in the strife. When the struggle
is over what will it all be worth if we have never used
this mighty agency of good or of evil for Christ and
for God ? On a tombstone in an Italian churchyard,
as 1 have been told, there is this inscription : " Here
lies Estelle, who, having transported a large fortune to
Heaven, in acts of charity, has gone thither to enjoy it."
Is not this to use our stewardship, whether of wealth,
of intellect, or of opportunity, at once Christianly and
wisely ? Blessed privilege, to spend and be spent for
the Master ! Ours be it to imitate their " good exam-
ple " who, whatsoever were the talents which their Lord
had given them, have so used those talents that, at the
last, their ears shall hear their Lord declare, " Thou
hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee
ruler over many things ; enter thou into the joy of thy
Lord ! "

VI.

SERMON COMMEMORATIVE OF ADAM NORRIE.

/ myself have seen the ungodly in poiver, and flourishing
like a gree7i bay-tree. J went by, and lo ! he ivas gone ; /
sought him, but his place could no more be found.

Mark the perfect man and behold the upright. For the end
of that man is peace. — Psalm xxxvii. 36-38.

If there were no other evidence that the Bible came
from God, we might find it in that inspired insight with
which it binds together the two worlds of matter and
of mind, — the realm of nature and the realm of man.
" I have seen the wicked in power," says David, '' and
flourishing like a green bay-tree ; " and we have in the
words a perfect image of something of apparent vitality,
strong, lusty, and obtrusive, but essentially short-lived
and evanescent. For though we may not be certain just
what the writer means here by a " bay-tree," it is plain
enough that he has in mind some one of those hasty-
growing shrubs in which the East is so rich, which
shoot from their seed in a night, and which assert an
apparent vitality that is seemingly invincible. We all
know them here in the West. Though they may not
bear the same names, there are in every forest and

Commemorative of Adam Norrie. 87

garden these quick-growing plants that swiftly over-
shadow their humbler neighbors, and which assert them-
selves by a kind oi domineering and extinguishing pre-
eminence. And we kno\y, too, that these are the
growths that have no staying power. The frost nips
them. The sun scorches them. The wind uproots
them ; and then the gardener gathers them up and
throws them over the wall. " We go by, and lo ! they
are gone. We seek them, but their places can no more
be found I "

Is there anything that answers more precisely to this
than, for example, that intellectual quickness in which our
time is so rich, and which seems to achieve so much ?
Was there ever in all the world such nimble-wittedness
as makes itself heard by a thousand voices and pens
to-day ? What a gift our modern literature i^eveals of
quick growth and large and self-asserting expansion !
How it plants itself in all the paths of thought and
hurls its keen shafts of criticism at all things sacred
and secular ! Here is some one whom yesterday nobody
had ever heard of. To-day he is dictating " leaders,"
indicting a creed, expounding a philosophy, or inaugu-
rating a school of reform. Stop a moment, and think
of the teachers of science, of art, of theology (or of
something that they called theology), who have come
and gone since you and I were children ! Where are
they ? Where are the systems that they propounded^
the seeds that they sowed, the trees whose leaves they
were so sure were for the healing of the nations ? The
question is easily answered. In every library there is

88 Waymarks,

a rubbish shelf. Climb up to it, if you will, and read
the titles of the books that you will find there, and ask
yourself if by any chance anybody will ever read them
again, except as curiosities of literature or encyclopae-
dias of human folly. They grew, they spread, they
challenged men's wonder and admiration. And then,
m a night, their power was gone, their leaf withered,
and out of the places that knew them they have van-
ished forever.

But the Psalmist reminds us that that world which,
in contradistinction to the world of matter, we call the
world of mind, or of man, includes not only an intel-
lectual but a moral element. Men are not only clever
or stupid, they are good or bad. And it is not of the
clever people that he is chiefly speaking here, but of
the wicked people. " I have seen the wicked flourish-
ing like a green bay-tree." And who of us has not seen
that too ? The prosperity of people who do not deserve
to be prosperous, — is there any commoner spectacle,
or, as it seems to most of us, more perplexing than
that ? Indeed there are plenty of persons who are
daily saying, in substance, " Do not tell me that God
is a good God, and that He is on the side of righteous-
ness. Do not tell me that there is a God at all. I
know better ! A Being who was great enough to rule
the world, and who was on the side of virtue, would
not suffer virtue to walk and vice to ride. If He ever
looks down on the world that you say He has made, He
sees selfish power lifting itself into the high places, and
honest poverty ground into the dust under its chariot-

Commemorative of Adam Norrie. 89

wheels. He sees an ignoble nature drawing to itself
all the juices of that associated life in the midst of
which it lives, and enriching itself at the cost of virtu-
ous and defenceless weakness. And he suffers it to be
so. He never interferes to hinder it ! "

Stop, I beseech you, right there, my brother, and ask
yourself whether that is true. On the contrary, is it
not true that just as certainly as there are physical
tornadoes in which the bay-tree and its kind are torn
up by the roots and blown away into everlasting oblivion
and nothingness, so there are moral tornadoes, irregu-
lar and long-delayed it may be, but coming in the his-
tory of every nation, every community, every man, when
the thing that is not rooted in righteousness comes in
its turn to be swept from what seemed to be its strong
foundations, and made to vanish as though it had not
been ? Verily, I think if we have never been able to
own that before, we might have the candor to own it
this morning. No people ever had more wholesome
illustration of the existence of moral forces in society
than we have had in this very land and commonwealth
of ours. Whatever else is uncertain, this is certain :
that no bad thing, no matter out of what noble tradi-
tions and policies it may seem to have grown, has any
power of survival, when once it has been false to those
great moral ideas which were originally its strength and
glory.

And this, which is true of policies, is supremely true
of men. Does any one say that wickedness is stronger
than goodness, and that the thing that succeeds is the

90 Wat/marks.

thing that has the elements of success in it, — popu-
larity, social following, wealth, force of will, cleverness,
everything or anything that goes to make success ?
Then I ask him simply to sit down for a little, and imi-
tate the example of the writer of this Psalm. He was
an old man. He tell us so himself, in an earlier verse
when he writes, " 1 have been young and now am old ; "
and he is not delivering his opinion from the oracular
standpoint of the man of twenty-five or thirty, who,
having seen his first ideals shattered, is settling down
to the cynical faith that society is a fellowship of false-
hood, and that the prosperous man is the man who is
the shrewdest and the strongest and the most hard-
hearted. No 1 He has lived through that earlier period
of distrust of goodness, — it was the period in which, as
he tells us, he said in his haste, " all men are liars," —
and he has come to that loftier table-land which is
reached with a ripe old age, and from which he can
look back on a lifelong and thoughtful experience.
And from this standpoint it is that he says, " I have
seen the ungodly in great power, and flourishing like
a green bay -tree. But I went by, and lo I he was
gone. I sought him, but his place was nowhere to be
found ! "

To you, 0 sons of men, I call this morning. Answer
me out of your own mature experience, is David right or
wrong ? You have lived, let us say, in this community,
or some other. It is no matter. You have seen the
rise from obscure beginnings of many men who have
come at length to be in great power. Some of them

Commemorative of Adam Norrie. 91

were men about whom you could not speak certainly ;
but of some of them you could. There was no doubt
about their aims, or motives, or character. They were
wicked men. What has become of them ?

On the other hand, says David, " Mark the perfect
man and behold the upright, for the end of that man is
peace." Hold fast here to the image with which the
writer begins. It is an image borrowed from the growth
of a tree. There are things that grow superficially, and
then there are trees, that have roots ; and there are men
who are just like such trees. David calls them perfect
men, not because they were without a flaw, — there are
flaws enough in the bark of an oak if you will look for
them, — but because they live their life after the law of
a perfect ideal. An oak is the noblest thing of its kind,
and that which strikes us in it is that in root and trunk
and branch it is so intrinsically grand and steadfast.
Men have worshipped it as a symbol of strength, and
they might have worshipped it as a symbol of perfec-
tion. It is built on a great scale, and it lives in obe-
dience to a high ideal, or as we prefer to say in nature,
to a great law.

And there are men who are like oaks. Faults they
may have, for they are human, but they are domi-
nated by a Perfect Ideal. His life rules theirs. It is
that in which theirs is rooted, and by virtue of it they
endure. " Mark the perfect man," — the man who
believes in a perfect law and a perfect Friend and
Saviour, and who aims to be like Him, and in him you
will behold the upright, — something that stands erect,

92 Waymarhs.

that has columnar qualities, and that has not only
leaves but roots. Such men do not disappear. They
die, but their virtues live. And when they die the cur-
tain falls upon a serene and peaceful hope, the pupil
passing out of the school-room into the Head Master's
house, the ripe scholar in the university of human dis-
cipline taking at last his good degree.

It is of such an one that I would fain speak this
morning and so reassure your faith and my own in the
face of a great and irreparable loss which within the past
few months has come to this church. By virtue of his
office as senior warden of this parish, Mr. Adam Norrie
was known to almost every one in this congregation ;
which, when he passed away last June, must have read
with something of surprise of the great age to which he
had attained. His presence was so fresh and vital, his
step was so quick and elastic, the light that played in
his eyes had so much sometimes that was almost boy-
ish in its vivacity, that few persons would have sus-
pected that when Mr. Norrie left us he was nearly
ninety years of age. For myself, I lived to see in these
physical tokens the triumph of that inward law of
renewal which gives to a Christian old age a perennial
freshness, and which tells of a peace of mind and a
manly simplicity of faith that blossom out thus with the
tokens of a life that is immortal. Mr. Norrie never
grew old, and so when he passed away there were some
of us to whom his departure seemed something to which
we could not soon or easily become accustomed.

It belongs to us to-day to remhid ourselves, in view

Commemorative of Adam Norrie. 98

of that departure, of the positive witness which is to be
found in such a life as his to the words of this thirty-
seventh Psahn. It is due to him, to his place in this
community, to his services to this church, that we
should recall the story of his career, and give expression
to our loving admiration of his personal character.

Mr. Norrie was of Scottish birth and descent. He
was born in the year 1796, in Montrose, Scotland, and
he never forgot it. He went in early life to Gottenburg,
Sweden, and nine years later he came to New York.
But he never grew cold to the land or the city of his
birth, and with a punctual regularity which was his con-
spicuous characteristic, made the poor of his native city
the annual recipients of his thoughtful bounty. It
shows in what estimate he was held by the people of his
birth-place that he received at their hands the gift of
the freedom of the city, a dignity reserved in its annals
for men of no lower rank than Richard Cobden.

Of Mr. Norrie's career as a merchant in New York I
would that 1 might speak at length. It was not one
wholly without reverses, though it was one of substan-
tial and permanent success. But the aspect of it which
may chiefly interest us here is that which reveals to us
the progress of a Christian merchant, shrewd, prudent,
diligent in his daily business, but, better than all this,
dominated, from first to last by lofty and resolute prin-
ciples. Mr. Norrie came speedily to be known in New
York after he had removed here, and won quickly an
honorable and eminent position among New York mer-
qhants. But from the beginning to the end it was sim-

94 Waymarks,

ply true of him that no one ever came to know him,
without feeling that the man was a great deal more
than his belongings, and that his personal character was
one of exceptional purity and nobleness.

Such a man had great opportunities for usefulness,
and he did not neglect them. Thirty years ago there
was living in this city a clergyman whose name will
never be forgotten in this community, and who had the
rare gift of drawing to himself the sympathy and co-
operation of earnest Christian laymen. Dr. Muhlenberg
would have left his mark upon the Church, under any
circumstances, but he would never have been able to
build St. Luke's Hospital and found St. Jolmland if he
had not been able also to dratr to his side such men as
Robert B. Minturn, and John David Wolfe, and Adam
Norrie. Mr. Norrie became the Treasurer of St. Luke's
Hospital from the outset, and his absolute identification
with its work continued from that hour until his death.
Between himself and Dr. Muhlenberg there grew up a
most tender and intimate friendship, and a friend to
whose graceful pen I am indebted for many of the data
of his life records how Dr. Muhlenberg was wont to
speak of Mr. Norrie's rare qualities of head and heart,
often summing up the whole with the words, "And such
a gentleman I " It was one of those finer touches of
which Dr. Muhlenberg alone was capable ; and it recalls
that rare union of courtesy with dignity, of gentleness,
and often playful kindness, with uprightness which
make Christian manners the exponent of the Christian
man.

Commemorative of Adam Norrie. 95

It was owing to Mr. Norrie's association with Dr.
Muhlenberg in the work of St. Luke's Hospital that he
came, later, to share with him the large responsibilities
of the beautiful charity known as St. Johnland. An
experiment which to many minds seemed wildly vision-
ary was made, through the munificent co-operation of
those personal friends of Dr. Muhlenberg to whom I
have just referred, and their immediate kindred, a sub-
stantial success. But when Dr. Muhlenberg was taken
away from the head of St. Johnland, it is not easy to
see how it could have continued its work if it had been
deprived of the wise counsel and unwearied personal
interest of Mr. Norrie. He was the calm adviser in all
perplexities ; the gentle healer in all dissensions ; the
sympathizing friend in all discouragements. When
one of the sisters who had charge of the work at St.
Johnland, was robbed in the cars of a sum of money,
she received it back again a few days later, enclosed
in an envelope addressed in a disguised hand, and
containing a note with these words : " If he had known
who you were when he picked your pocket, he would
not have been guilty of so sacrilegious an act, and he
now desires to make restitution." That was, I im-
agine, the only anonymous letter that Mr. Norrie ever
wrote !

But all the while that he lived among us he was
making a permanent record, a record of good deeds,
and of blameless and upright living. He was for
more than fifty years a communicant of this church,
and from first to fast adorned his Christian profession

96 Waymarks.

by a consistent and exemplary walk and conversation.
He had a clear, simple, and masculine Christian faith,
which, in the substance of it, was worthy of his Scottish
training and ancestry. The fogs into which mere
speculatists find their way, he knew nothing of. God
was a present reality to him as a righteous Governor
and a loving Father, and, in those sorrows which came
to him, he knew what it was to lean, in a faith at once
manly and childlike, on the arm of that Elder Brother,
whose cross was to him a message, first, of forgiveness,
and then of strength and of hope !

And so we remember him to-day, the warm heart,
the kindly hand, the upright and honorable man of
business, the trusted counsellor, and, best of all, the
loyal Christian disciple. This community will miss
him at many a Board and in the wise conduct of many
a corporation with which he was identified. His church
will miss him from his post of senior warden, in which
he was the worthy successor of Wolfe, and Aymar, Bar-
clay, and Bradish, and others who have passed on to
their reward. The home and kindred to whom he was so
much will miss him most of all. But to us and to them
it belongs to remember that nothing that is really es-
sential in such a man has perished. The peaceful
departure of such a presence is not death but advance-
ment. We know that it survives under conditions of
enlarged and ennobled activity. And meantime its in-
fluence endures, a living and helpful power, and will
endure. How many men there were whom Mr. Norrie
saw as they came — and went. What fortunes and

Commemorative of Adam Norrie. 97

what reputations were made and lost during his long
life in this community. It does not need to be very old
to recall some of them — their brilliant promise, their
swift rise, and seemingly splendid successes, and then
the end — tragic sometimes, but always significant and
inevitable. Over against such histories there stands such
a life as his whom we recall to-day. What a message
in it for young men in New York, what a messasre in it
for all of us who are tempted to mistake short-lived
success for enduring growth, and sudden prosperity for
the priceless treasure of an unstained personal charac-
ter ! In the presence of such a character we learn
what it is that lasts, and remembering in what faith and
prayer it was nurtured we see how heaven's law, that
runs through earth and air and sky, is one and is
eternal. The life that lasts is the life that has roots.
The character that lives and grows is a character im-
bedded in righteousness. Great fortunes may crumble
into ruins. Human cleverness may be beaten with its
own weapons. The triumphs of to-day may herald the
dishonor of to-morrow. But God is from everlasting to
everlasting. His righteousness endures, and the man
who has planted himself on Him shall not be moved.
The winds may blow, but he can calmly face them. The
floods may arise, but he can defy the floods. For his
feet are planted upon the Rock, and that Rock is the
Rock of Ages. Mark the perfect man and behold the
upright, for ihe end, nay the beginning and the middle
and the end alike with him, are peace.

INTRODUCTORY TO A PLEA FOR THE
AMERICAN SUNDAY.

The problem of higher civilization in the United States
is, and seems likely more and more to become, a problem of
assimilation. Whatever may have been the purpose of the
founders of the republic, and however large may have been
the dream of empire which they cherished, it is doubtful if
they ever anticipated the assemblage on these shores of a
multitude so heterogeneous as that which to-day throngs
them. They believed that they were escaping from certain
forms of oppression, indeed, but not in order to part company
with that whole conception of social order, of religious faith,
of domestic obligation for which the worship and habits of
their forefathers so largely stood. If anything is plain in
their history and conduct it is that they meant to lay the
foundations of the State in reverence and upward looking
trust, and, as conserving these things, in a social order
which conserved sacred days and places and a due recogni-
tion of their enduring relation to belief and conduct.

It has, indeed, been attempted to show that even in the
beginning of the life of the republic this was only partially
true; that as, in fact, as a recent writer has striven to make
out, the term Anglo-Saxon applies only in a very limited
and partial sense to those whose were the first steps in the
direction of a more completely organized State on this con-
tinent, so there was from the beginning a great variety of
traditions as to those institutions, such, for instance, as the
observance of the Lord's-day, concerning which the tradi-
tion is commonly supposed to have been so uniform and
consistent.

Undoubtedly there is something in such a claim, but far
less than those who make it would have us believe. There

Introduction. 99

were indeed Celts as well as Saxons, Frenchmen and Irish-
men as well as Englishmen and Hollanders among those
who were concerned with the beginnings in the English
colonies. But that last jjhrase describes the whole situation
in a way with which only a disingenuous logic can dis-
semble. Those who colonized these shores, — those whose
energy and daring and God-fearing loyalty to their own
consciences brought here the men and the manners that give
to this New World for many a long day its best repute, —
were not divided nor in doubt as to what they wanted to do,
for instance, with the Lord's-day or the ten commandments.

That the United States is being flooded, to-day, with
multitudes of people who, from one cause or another have in
other lands learned to be profoundly indifferent to either, can-
not for one moment be doubted. That such persons are most
impatient of those restraints which prevent them from dese-
crating the day of all others most sacred to Christendom as
the Lord's-day, cannot be seriously disputed. It was in the
interest of its defence that the sermon here following, on
the American Sunday, was preached. It is an interesting
and suggestive commentary upon its deliver}^ that, as the
preacher was subsequently informed (he did not himself see
the article quoted), the leading journal of perhaps the most
numerous foreign element in Xew York gave notice to the
preacher and his co-religionists, of the intention of those
for whom it professed to speak to do with the American
Sunday ''precisely what they pleased." Subsequent events
would seem to indicate that that threat was well on the way
towards its fulfilment j and the gradual secularizing of the
day once so largely consecrated to rest and worship is not
the least grave among our higher social problems.

The sermon that follows was preached in Grace Church,
New York, on Sunday afternoon, May 19, 1878, before the
New York Sabbath Society.

VII.

A PLEA FOR THE AMERICAN SUNDAY.

He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord;
and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth
not regard it. — Romans xiv. 6.

I TAKE these words, as at any rate a point of departure,
because they are commonly accounted the strongest
argument from the Book which we honor against the
day which equally we honor. It will clear the air if we
can succeed in understanding what they mean and how
much they prove.

We are usually referred to them as conclusively dis-
posing of Sunday. It is urged that their plain meaning
is that the regarder and the disregarder of any partic-
ular day may equally be influenced by a devout and
reverent motive. And if this be true, then it is further
urged that any one who disregards our holy day, or
Sunday, may be as truly religious as he who observes
it. Nay more, it is claimed that the observance of any
particular day as especially sacred or holy is a usage
which Saint Paul disesteems, and is founded upon a
principle which he disowns.

To see whether this is so, we shall do well to look
at the circumstances under which these words of the

A Plea for the American Sunday. 101

Apostle were written. He is addressing, you will
remember, those converts from among the Jews who
had become Christian disciples, ^'ow what was the
difficulty in the minds of these ? It was, briefly, that
they had been educated to observe the Jewish Sabbath,
or the seventh day of the week, as sacred, while the
Christian converts in Rome, who were converts, not
from Judaism but from Paganism, had been educated
to follow the usage which grew up from the time of
the Resurrection, of observing, not the seventh day, or
the Jewish Sabbath, but the first day of the week, the
Christian " Lord's-day," or Sunday. It was natural
that this difference in a religious usage of such a nature
should have provoked controversy and begotten hard
feeling. The Jew has never easily let go his religious
traditions, and the Gentile converts were even less
inclined to yield their Christian customs to the dicta-
tion of a despised race.

What now has the Apostle to say upon this issue ?
Just precisely the large-minded and impartial words
which we might have expected of him. As between
the seventh day and the first day, he declares, there is,
as a matter of principle, nothing to choose. If one man
regarded Saturday, and disregarded Sunday it mattered
not. And, equally, it mattered not if another dis-
esteemed Saturday and esteemed Sunday. No man was
to force his conscience. " Let every man be fully per-
suaded in his own mind." As a matter of fact he him-
self had evidently surrendered, already, his old Jewish
usage, and had elected to keep the first day. And,

102 Waymarks.

equally as a matter of fact, the Jewish converts to
Christianity, sooner or later, universally followed his
example. There is no reason to doubt that by the
end of the first century the observance of the seventh
day as a holy day by the Christian Church had virtu-
ally ceased. But meantime it was the unequivocal
position of the Apostle that those who had scruples as
to that change must not be forced to violate them, but
must rather be left to outgrow them.

So much^for those circumstances which furnish to
us the clue to the words of the text. How much
authority is to be found in them, thus rationally inter-
preted, for the abolition of the Lord's-day ? Not a
shadow. In the words immediately preceding the text
Saint Paul declares, " One man esteemeth one day
above another, another esteemeth every day." (There
is no " alike," in the Greek, the word having been
arbitrarily inserted by the translators.) In this verse
the word translated " esteemeth," means rather " sepa-
rates," or " distinguishes ; " and the idea is, " one man
hallows one day, another hallows all days." " Let
every man be fully persuaded in his own mind." Plainly
here the only question is between persons disposed to
hallow different days, or, in some cases, even all days.
But it is not easy to see how it furnishes any authority
for secularizing all days. If the Apostle had said, " One
man disesteemeth one day, another man disesteemeth
all days," then there would have been some warrant
for inferring from the following words, " let every man
be fully persuaded in his own mind," some authority

A Plea for the American Sunday. 103

for abolishing Sunday. But anybody who looks into
the New Testament to find there any faintest intimation
that Saint Paul regarded it as a matter of indifference
whether one should keep any holy day at all, will look
in vain. Here, as elsewhere, he gives the Jew a right
to cling to his ancient usage mitil he should outgrow
it for the Christian usage, and, meantime, he himself
commends that Christian usage by the way in which
he inculcated and practised it among the gentiles.

But more than this Saint Paul could not have done,
even had he been minded to. The consecration of one
dav in seven to uses other and more sacred than those
of the rest is ordained by a law which lies a long way
behind either the religion of Christ or the religion of
Moses. That law is imbedded in the very constitution,
physical, mental, and moral, of human nature, and as
human nature has awakened to its consciousness and
its significance, just in that proportion has it ennobled
and advanced itself. The first nations in the family
of nations to-day are those who, whether early and
quickly, or slowly and late, have learned to hallow one
day and keep it sacred ; and the loftiest achievements
in arms, in literature, in science, in philanthropy, in
missionary enterprise, and in social advancement, be-
long to that Anglo-Saxon people whose observance of
Sunday is to-day the wonder and the admiration of
every intelligent traveller.

We who are here this afternoon received that
day from those Anglo-Saxon ancestors. How they
in turn received it from those first missionaries who

104 Way marks.

found their way to Britain by way of France from
Asia Minor, I shall not tarry now to remind you. I
am aiming at another point, and that I pray you to
observe.

This is New York, — so-called because its early inhab-
itants came, some of them, from Old York. Yonder is
New England, whose early settlers found their way to
its rock-bound coasts from Old England. To the south
of us is Pennsylvania, or the English Quaker Penn's
Woods ; and Marj^-land, or the land of Queen Mary ;
and Virginia, or the land of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth ;
and the Carolinas, or the land of King Charles ; and
Georgia, or the land of King George. Were these
names given to the original States of this Union by
accident ? Who gave them, and what do they mean ?
They were given by the men who first settled those
States, and they were meant to proclaim where those
men had come from and what they were. They were
not Frenchmen, nor Dutchmen, nor Italians, nor Swedes,
nor Russians. They were Anglo-Saxons. I do not for-
get that you can find plenty of Dutch names in New
York, and plenty of French names in South Carolina.
I do not forget that, from the beginning, these shores
have hospitably welcomed people of every race and
language and religion. But the fact remains that, from
that beginning, these colonies and States have been
the territory and the homes of an Anglo-Saxon people.
Its language is the English language. Its laws are
Anglo-Saxon laws, tracing back their lineage if you
choose to Roman law, but coming to you and me to-

A Plea for the American Sunday. 105

day not because of their Roman roots but because of
their English roots. And, finally, its religion is an
Anglo-Saxon religion, — Syrian first, if you prefer to
call it so, and then it may have been French, in so
far as it found its way from that East which was the
liome of the Master, to English shores across French
territory, but English, so far as you and 1 are concerned,
in this, that, whether Puritans or Prelatists to-day, we
received it from English forefathers who brought it
with them to these shores.

Now, then, one conspicuous feature of that Christian
faith and worship which you and I have received from
our ancestors is the reverent observance of the Lord's-
day. So deeply imbedded is that reverence that it has
become a part of the common law of the land and a
contract made on Sunday and a deed of sale given on
that day are equally invalid. ^ By a common consent,
which (so far as the memory of civilized man upon
this continent can testify) knows nothing to the con-
trary, Sunday is a hallowed day, marked off from unhal-
lowed worldly and common usages, if not by universal
custom, at least by common and undisputed tradition.

But of late we have been hearing a new gospel upon
this subject. Within the last fifty years, and especially
within the last twenty, this country has received an
enormous immigration, principally of Irishmen, Germans,
Swedes, Norwegians, Italians, French, and Chinese, not
to mention scores of other nations who are now repre-

1 See the case of Lindmiiller vs. The People, 33 Barbour's Reports,
p. 458.

106 Waymarks.

sented among our cities in lesser numbers. Let me
speak of every one of them with heartiest respect. It
is not easy to estimate the indebtedness of a land like
ours to these strangers, of various speech and divers
faith. If Irishmen have built our cities, Germans have
taught us how to live in them with thrift and frugality.
If sunny Italy has sent us the torturing peripatetic
whose vagrant organ has been the enemy of repose and
the terror of the invalid, it has sent us also a vast num-
ber of hard-working and orderly citizens. And who
have so successfully conquered our northern and west-
ern wildernesses as our Swedish and Norwegian immi-
grants ? — even as the despised Chinaman has built the
railways over which they have travelled to reach those
wildernesses. In a word, there is no foreign element
which Americans have not welcomed with cordial greet-
ing and equal protection.

We are approaching a point, however, where there
seems to be growing among us a demand for more tlian
this. We are told that some of our national customs
are puritanical and illiberal, and we are bidden, in some
quarters at least, to surrender them. It has happened
once, if no more, in our community, that a congregation
of Christian worshippers conducting its religious services
on the Lord's-day has found itself all but powerless to
protect the sanctity and decency of these services from
being invaded by the noisy revelry of a beer-garden and
concert saloon, in which tlie click of beer glasses and the
coarse shouts of the guests mingled with the coarser
melodies of the opera bouffe. Nay more, it has hap-

A Plea for the American Sunday. 107

pened more than once, when some word of remonstrance
has been raised against this steady encroachment upon
our national customs arid our municipal laws, that that
word of remonstrance has been met with a louder and
angrier word, which has bidden us to understand that
the people will have their rights, and that one of their
rights is, on Sunday at any rate, to do pretty much as
they please.

This smouldering sentiment among us would undoubt-
edly have met with a more prompt and emphatic rebuke
if it had not often received tacit, if not open encourage-
ment from an opposite social extreme. We have those
among us who, having abundant leisure all the week to
do nothing, think that they cannot better employ Sun-
day than by making it the day for their most ostenta-
tious pleasure-seeking. Accustomed to borrow the
fashions of their raiment and the seasoning of their
viands as well as such dubious literature as they are
capable of mastering from a land in which Sunday is
conspicuously disesteemed and dishonored as a day of
Christian worship, they have lately undertaken to bor-
row also its Sunday customs. And thus that great
intermediate class, the enormous majority in numbers,
in essential stability of character, in moral worth among
us, finds itself between two opposite forces equally and
openly hostile to our American Sunday.

I cannot greatly admire the spirit in which, too often,
they have met them. Beginning at first with austere
conceptions of the character and authority of Sunday,
they have ended, not uncommonly, in surrendering any

108 Way marks.

claim for its sacredness whatever. It was one of the
hundred good resolutions of Jonathan Edwards, " never
to utter anything that is sportive or matter of laughter on
the Lord's-day ; " and because we have come to the con-
clusion that the old Puritan strictness in such matters
was extravagant, we have, in many instances, abandoned
it for an habitual levity. Nay more, when one is met
and challenged by that somewhat imperious demand that
our foreign-born brethren shall have liberty to take our
American Lord's-day and convert it into a Berlinese or
Parisian Sunday, it is pitiful, sometimes, to see the
weak-kneed acquiescence with which such propositions
are met. I A^enture to submit that it is time that we
took our bearings a little more clearly in this matter.
It is surely a pertinent inquiry, whose country is this,
and what language does it speak, and by what sacred
traditions is it hallowed ? Who first sought it out, and
settled it, — subduing its wildernesses and founding its
cities, and opening its sea-ports ? From whence got it
its law and faith, and its Christian civilization? Who
have hallowed its hills and its valleys by their blood,
shed once and yet again in its defence ? Call it fanati-
cism, call it intolerance, call it political infatuation,
what you will, I venture to declare that it is high time
that our brethren of other lands, and otlier races, and
other religions, or no religion at all, understood clearly
and distinctly that while we welcome them to assimila-
tion to our national life, America is for Americans, and
that while we will welcome every foreigner, Christian or
Jew, Pagan or Positivist, to our shores, they are our

A Plea for the American Sunday/. 109

shores, not his, and are to be ruled by our traditions, not
those of other people. It is, in fact, as utter an imperti-
nence for the German or the Frenchman, for the Jew
or the Mohammedan to come here demanding that we
shall waive the customs and repeal the laws that hallow
our Lord's-day, as that we shall surrender our language
for the dialect of the Black Forest, or our marriage rela-
tions for the domestic usages of the Sultan. No one
comes here in ignorance of American usage or tradition
on these points. It is, I repeat, a solemn impertinence
when any foreigner demands that we shall surrender
those usages because they do not happen to have been
his. And it does not become less of an impertinence
because, in any particular community, — in New York
for instance, — the numerical majority may happen to
be in favor of radical changes in, or even the utter
abolition of, our Sunday laws. A half a dozen ship-
loads of people landed at New Bedford, on the coast of
Massachusetts, might convert that decent and self-
respecting and monogamic community in twentj^-four
hours into a city in which the majority of the people
were in favor of the religion of Joe Smith and the
domestic usages of Mormonism. But I have yet to learn
that that would be a valid reason for repealing the
laws of Massachusetts so far as they applied to the town
of New Bedford, in regard to the matter of polygamy.
There is something besides the accidental presence of
mere numbers to be reckoned in estimating the moral
sentiment and intelligent determination of the com-
munity ; and it is the majority, not of the idle, and

110 Waymarks.

vicious, and thriftless, of the ignorant, of aliens and of
agitators, but the majority of the upright and industri-
ous, the frugal and temperate, the thoughtful and the
self-respecting, whose voice should, on this point, be
potential. For one, I have no apprehension as to its
verdict, if only it shall insist upon being heard.

But that is the duty of the hour. It is one of the most
remarkable facts of our time that those older nations
from which some of us propose to borrow our habit of
disregard for the Lord's-day, are striving at this very
moment with most impressive earnestness to restore
the earlier sacredness of that day. In Germany, in
Switzerland, and in France, there are already organiza-
tions of serious and thoughtful men who are seeking to
banish the Continental Sunday. They have seen, on
the one hand, as any one may see in France to-day,
that the removal of the sacred sanctions, which with us,
hold the first day of the week in a kind of chaste re-
serve, have eventuated not merely in degrading it
to the level of a vulgar holiday, but also of degrading
and enslaving him for whom its privileges were, most
of all, designed, — the wearied, over-worked and poorly
paid, laboring man. They have seen that in such a
capital as Paris, it has already come to pass that the
working-man's Sunday is often as toilsome a day as any
other ; and that since the law no longer guards the day
from labor, the capitalist and contractor no longer spare
nor regard the laborer. He is a person out of whom
the most is to be got, and if he can work six days lie
may as well work the seventh also, so long as there is

A Plea for the Americmi Sunday. Ill

nothing to forbid it. Such a condition of things may
not directly threaten those of us who are protected by
wealth from the necessities of daily labor, but, if ours
is this more favored condition, all the more do we owe
it to our brother man who is less favored, to see to it
that he shall have every sanction with which the law
can furnish him to guard his day of rest from being
perverted and revolutionized into a day of toil. And if
he himself does not see that the more that we assimi-
late Sunday to other days by the amusements, the occu-
pations, the teaching and reading and thinking with
which we fill it, the greater is the danger that ultimately
we shall lose it altogether, the more earnestly are we
bound to strive to disseminate those sounder ideas which
shall set this first day of the week, and its devout ob-
servance before our fellow men and women of the labor-
ing classes in its true light, and so help and teach them
how, not to lose, but to keep it.

And if it is asked how best we can disseminate that
sounder and more conservative sentiment in regard to
this day, I answer first of all, by our example. There
is nothing in all the world so potent or so contagious as
that. Any one of us who has been much in other
lands must recognize its peculiar influence in this
particular matter of Sunday. I have heard of a clergy-
man as strolling into a bric-a-brac shop in Briissels, and
entering into negotiations for something that had
caught his eye in the shop-window, without ever realiz-
ing, till he took out his purse to pay for it, that he was
.chaffering with a tradesman for a bit of old carvinar

112 Waymarks,

on Sunday morning. The whole atmosphere of a con-
tinental city is usually so full, on the Lord's-day, of
the sounds and symbols of traffic, that one has to re-
call himself to the consciousness of Sunday, oftentimes,
by a positive and conscious effort of the will. And it
is not always greatly otherwise even at home. There is
in om' air a relaxed sentunent in regard to the observ-
ance of this day, and we are constantly challenged
to answer whether we regard the minute prohibitions of
the Fourth Commandment, and of the old Jewish law,
as binding upon Christians in this year of grace, 1878.
Let us not be afraid to admit that . our reverence for
this day stands upon different, and as I conceive, upon
higher ground. The institution of the Jewish Sabbath,
with its microscopic prohibitions, was undoubtedly part
of that educative system appropriate to a race in a state
of almost barbaric bondage, which has long ago passed
away. And we Christians no longer hold to that
Mosaic system, not so much because it has been for-
mally repealed as because it has been spiritually out-
grown. We are no longer under its law, but under the
Master's law of love. But, all the same, love will
provide a day in which the soul's highest aspirations
shall have a chance to find expression, and the truest
and most unselfish love will most jealously and sacredly
guard that day for others. And so, though a certain
liberty in things indifferent might, perhaps, make no
great difference, if you and I were to take it, we will
be careful how and when we take it, not merely for our
own sakes, but equally and always for our brother's

A Plea for the American Sunday, 113

sake. Instead of driving to church on Sundays we
shall be willing to walk, and so to let men-servants and
cattle rest, as well as ourselves. Instead of giving din-
ner-parties on Sunday, we shall try to let the cook be-
low stairs realize that it is Sunday, as well as the
master above stairs. And by the retirement that we
cultivate, and the books and the papers that are seen in
our own hands, and placed in the hands of our guests or
our children, we shall strive to indicate that there is a
difference between Sunday and other days, instead of
striving rather to obliterate that difference. No one
who can recall the Sunday usages of the American
people twenty years ago, and compare them with those
of to-day, will be insensible to the change which has
everywhere taken place. Undoubtedly that change is
largely traceable to the excitements of war-times, which
so blurred the week during their feverish continuance
that Sundays and week-days became equally secular.
But, whatever the cause, that the moral tone of the
community has been elevated and improved as this
earlier reverence for Sunday has decayed, there is no
one among us, I think, who will care to affirm. In
losing our old-fashioned Sundays, we seem to have lost
something else and more besides.

And hence it is that there is needed the influence of
our personal example to honor and conserve the sanctity
of the Lord's-day. Nor only that. We want an ear-
nest and united endeavor for the wider dissemination of
a sound teaching and literature upon this Sunday ques-
tion. If the drift of the social customs and average

8

114 Waymarks.

thinking of other lands is so largely in a direction con-
trary to that which we have been taught to account
as wliolesome, all the more must we strive to stem that
drift with a wiser and a healthier, and a more intelligent
sentiment. There exists in this city a committee of
gentlemen, who have, for some years, given themselves
most unselfishly to this work. I cannot too highly
commend the spirit and temper with which they have
done so. Theirs has not been a popular undertaking.
Nothing is that seems to interfere with the liberty of
the individual in things comparatively innocent. And
so this committee has sometimes been sneered at, and
sometimes denounced. All honor to them for the manly
courage, the dignified reserve, and the unswerving firm-
ness with which they have persevered in their work !
Let them not feel that in doing it they are standing
quite alone. They have already had the generous co-
operation and sympathy of some of the most earnest
Christian men and women in this community. Give
them a continuance of that sympathy, and let their
treasury be enriched by the expression of your sub-
stantial support ! They are striving for the preserva-
tion of our American Sunday. God help this land and
this people, if ever the time shall come when their
labors shall prove to have been in vain !

For when that time shall come it will be because the
sentiment of religion, and the aspiration of an upward-
reaching faith will have perished among us. We may
declaim as we please in behalf of a philosophy which
makes all days holy to the universal worship of hu-

A Pita for the American Sunday. 115

manity by making no day holy to the worship of a per-
sonal God ; but the decay of stated times and seasons
for the offering of that worship presages a day when
neither God nor man, neither life nor property, neither
human weakness nor human needs, have any rights nor
any scantiest respect. To learn that fact we need go
back no farther than the history of France in 1788.
Ought it not to be enough that God has taught the
world so stern and tragic a lesson on this subject and
taught us that lesson so lately ?

For, after all, the question is not so much one of the
safety and well-being of life and property as of the
higher well-being of the personal soul. A great states-
man is reported to have said to one who sought of him
an interview concerning secular matters on the Lord's-
day, " I MUST keep one day in which to realize what lam,
a7id where I am going I^"* Ay, "where I am going."
Does that question ever occur to us ? We are passing
with steady tread and never-pausing foot-steps to the
threshold of that low-bowed portal through which we
must, the youngest of us, soon bend our heads to pass,
and so be lost from the sight of our earthly friends
forever. As we shall emerge beyond it, it is our hope
and expectation to emerge into the companionship of a
Being who has made us, and of His Son who has re-
deemed us. Have we ever paused to ask ourselves how
far we have attuned our lives, our thoughts, our affec-
tions, to that loftier fellowship that is to be ? Oh, to
be in that unseen home that lies beyond the heavenly
horizons, — to seethe form of Him who walks amid

116 Waymarks.

the golden candlesticks, and yet to be a stranger to
its King, and an alien from its spirit and its speech, this,
it seems to me, would be the most dismal of incongrui-
ties, and the dreariest of fates !

And therefore thank God for Sunday, and for all
that, in this our free America, it stands for ! May
He make us grateful more and more for this inheri-
tance, and may He give us courage and resolution
to guard it sacredly and to cherish it tenderly, and
so hand it on and down, unchanged and unimpaired,
to our children and our children's children !

CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION.

The traveller who goes up and down, whether in New Eng-
land or elsewhere in the older States of the republic, will
remark a characteristic which in small as well as large com-
munities is widely apparent. The cities and villages are, in
many of their more conspicuous features, being rebuilded;
and this rebuilding is especially noteworthy, in contrast to
that which one sees in the old world, for its departure from
earlier types. In parts of Cologne and Munich, indeed, and
in some other European cities, one may see the appearance
not only of modern structures, but of structures of modern
rather than antique design. But usually, whether in domes-
tic, civic, or ecclesiastical architecture, the local tradition is
adhered to, and the new is new only in its material and not
in its idea. Indeed this may be seen frequently in those
cases where communities from the old world have settled in
considerable numbers in our own land. The church or the
inn looks often like a veritable transplantation from beyond
seas.

The American usage, however, is in marked contrast to
this. Partly, it is true, this is to be explained by the poverty,
meagreness, and absence of all architectural character in our
earlier structures. But far more is it to be explained by
that advance in popular ideas and ideals which has largely
broken with our immediate past and has come under the
influence of other and most dissimilar impressions.

In the discourse which follows this is indicated as an il-
lustration of that other transformation which has come to
pass in the intellectual and religious life of New England,

118 Waymarks,

and it might have been shown, had' the occasion called for it,
in other parts of the country. No candid observer can be
insensible to the fact. The more urgent question with many
earnest and devout minds is and will be, for some time to
come, as to its tendency. That there are dangers in that
tendency no one will care to deny. The simplicity, the
austerity, the rigidity, of which the New England meeting-
house was a symbol, stood, unquestionably, for certain great
ideas, the conservation of which is essential to the integrity,
and indeed to the very existence, of a Church or a nation.
That with the growing complexity, luxury, and changeful-
ness of our modern life, such ideas are seriously threatened,
no one who knows some prevalent notes in social, commer-
cial, and political life will care to deny. And so some have
made haste to say, ^'Yes, we are going through a process
of reconstruction, but it will cost us more than we shall
gain. Life is richer, theology is more tolerant, worship is
more beautiful, art is more reverenced, but God is not in it
all, or, if He is, some of His most distinctive attributes are
becoming sadly obscured."

It is because I believe that that Scriptural and Apostolic
faith and order in which was set apart the Church at whose
consecration the sermon here following was preached, has su-
premely a message of hope and of re-assurance to such fears,
that I have included it in this volume. A faith and order
which shall at once discriminate between the permanent and
the variable, letting go the latter when need shall be, and
steadfastly holding fast to the former, — which shall not
cling so tenaciously to its past as to misread the needs of the
present and the opportunities of the future, — this is the faith
and order, at once conservative and reconstructive, which can
best serve the Church, the State, the individual.

The sermon which follows was preached at the consecra-
tion, June 19, 1888, of the new edifice erected for Trinity
Church, Lenox, Mass., to replace that erected a. d. 1816.

VIII.

THE RECONSTRUCTIVE POWER OF
CHRISTIANITY.

Then came the zvord of the Lord by Haggai the iwophet^
saying^ Is it a time for you, 0 ye, to dwell in your ceiled
houses and this house lie waste ?

Now therefore thus saith the Lord of Hosts ; consider your
icays. ... Go up . . . and build the house; and I icill
take pleasure in it and . . . will be glorified, saith the
Lord. . . .

And the Lord stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel, the son of
Shealtiel, . . . and the spirit of Joshua the son of Jose-
dech, the high priest, and the spirit of all the remnant of
the people ; and they came and did work in the House
of the Lord of Hosts, their God. — Haggai, i. 3-5, 8, 14.

So it was of old, and so it is to-day. I shall speak to
you this morning of the reconstructive power of revealed
religion, and its relation to this occasion.

And at the outset it may be well that I should remind
you of that double process which from the beginning of
history has been going on in human society.

When we trace that history to its vanishing-point we
find that it disappears where there is no longer any trace
of law and order and organized life. There was a time,
doubtless, though there are only the most meagre records

120 Way marks.

of it, when people roamed about without rule, without
homes, without plan or purpose. The beginnings of his-
tory are where that condition of things began to cease.
There was a patriarch, a chieftain, a law-giver, who con-
ceived the idea of a State ; who saw the might and the
beauty of order, to whom was revealed the power and the
peace of government. And such a man, in some far-off
age, began to turn his vision into fact, — to rule, to
set in array, to make symmetrical, in one word, to build
society. No matter who he was, — Moses, Alexander,
Caesar, Peter the Great, William the Silent, Washington,
— this is the large idea that shines through all that he
did and was. Civilization, in a word, is constructive,
and that is the supreme distinction between it and bar-
barism. A great State, like a great family, has its
periods of rise, of growth, of achievement, and of de-
cline. But, in the one case as in the other, you may
trace these periods by what they constructed. The
domestic architecture of England or Italy is a history of
great households that built themselves, their ambitions,
their idiosyncrasies, their triumphs, into the homes in
which they lived.

And so of States and of the institutions which they
create, or perpetuate. In these you may read the march
of ideas, the evolution, noble or ignoble, of national ten-
dencies,— the expression, in one word, of national char-
acter. Doric simplicity, — Corinthian luxury ; we take
a column from a temple of the one era, or the other, and
it tells the whole story.

And this fact, which we may trace anywhere that men

The Reconstructive Power of Christianity, 121

have lived and wrought and fought, we may trace, pre-
eminently, in that story of the Hebrew people from
whose pages I take the text. In the beginning of its
national and religious life there is no temple, no taber-
nacle, no tent, — nothing but an Arab sheik with a
vision of God, to whom there comes one day the mes-
sage " Fear not, Abram, I am thy shield and thy exceed-
ing great reward," and " I will make of thee a great
nation, and thine offspring shall be as the sand upon the
sea shore."

And then there come the successive steps : the vision
at Peniel, as we have read it this morning, with the
gleaming ladder reaching from earth to heaven and
angels going to and fro upon it ; the tabernacle in the
wilderness ; the visible Shechinah ; the Ark of the Cove-
nant ; the Temple of Solomon ; and, rising side by side
with these, a tribe, a group of tribes, a leadership of
patriarchs, a rulership of priests, a government of judges,
a sovereignty of kings. Social progress, structural pro-
gress ; these are the two things that move forward hand
in hand, and the story of the one is forever repeated to
us in the characteristics of the other. Besides what
Herodotus tells us, how little we know of Egypt ! But
we go there, and along the banks of the Nile, in those
tombs and palaces which the sands of ages have at once
buried and preserved to us, we read the least and home-
liest details of a nation's religion, of a nation's daily
life.

Such considerations prepare us for a line of reflection
which, 1 hope you will agree with me, is not inappropri-

122 Waymarks.

ate to this place and this occasion. We who are Ameri-
cans may not disassociate ourselves from our remoter
past, — that past which runs back into distant centuries
and distant lands. But neither may we forget that we
have a distinct and distinctively national life and national
history. And in the light of that history, the act for
which we are gathered here to-day becomes, I venture
to submit, profoundly impressive.

The ancestors of most of those to whom I speak this
morning came to these shores for a definite reason and
with a tolerably distinct purpose. Oat of an age of
luxury, of wide-spread corruption, of ecclesiastical in-
tolerance, they came forth to found in a new world, a
new commonwealth for God. They were, as a rule,
without wealth, without social prestige, without force of
arms or numbers. They had certain profound convic-
tions and an intense though narrow piety. The ideas of
toleration, of religious liberty, of true catholicity of
temper which some of us fondly impute to them, they
neither held nor dreamed of, and such ideas were as
much in advance of their time as the developments of
modern science.

But they had a profound conviction of God, and of the
binding obligations of duty. And these began to find
expression just so soon as they began to build. They
appear in their laws, harsh enough doubtless in many
particulars, such as those relating to the observance of
Sunday, and the convenient jest of our modern license,
but shot through and through with the golden thread of
a reverence for what they understood to be divine sane-

The Reconstructive Power of Christianity. 1*23

tions. They appear no less in their structures, wherein,
whatever was the meagreness and bareness of their
homes, — ihade so by their struggles and their poverty,
— their sanctuaries were always somewhat less mean.
The New England meeting-house, standing usually, as
with you, upon some commanding hill, dominated the
community in more ways than one. Thither the tribes
were wont appropriately, CA'en as the Psalmist sings, " to
go up ; " and bare and austere as they were, there was
always something of sober dignity, a touch of richness
and costliness, not usually to be found elsewhere. Much
of the first mahogany that came to our part of the world
went into the desks and handrails of New England pul-
pits, and the velvet hangings and fringes were, to many
a youthful imagination, the only interpretation that it
knew of the fringes and draperies of the Tabernacle and
the Temple. Our fathers had not much of worldly sub-
stance to give, but they gave to God of their best.

Well, the old era has come and gone. On what a
new world the American of to-day looks out, when
he contrasts its aspect with the past I I have seen a
statement by Mr. Gladstone that the increase of the
world's wealth during the last fifty years is greater than
the sum of all the accumulated and transmitted wealth
at the beginning of the Christian era. And in no nation
on earth has this increase been so rapid and so gigantic
as in our own. It is needless to say that such a fact as
this has revolutionized our national life. We have come,
in art, in architecture, in manners, as a little while ago
in the State, to the era of reconstruction. Our cities,

124 Way marks.

builded once, are being rebuilded. On every hand the
old is giving place to the new. The narrow proportions,
the meagre space, the simple decorations are all disap-
pearing before a movement of renewal which pulls down
that it may build again, larger, statelier, costlier than
our fathers ever dreamed of. Culture enlarges itself,
the tasks widen their horizon, and all that ministers to
these grows ampler, richer, and more expensive.

I do not know that there is anything greatly to fault
in this. A certain harmony between powers and envi-
ronment is w^hat we see in nature, and there is so much
of really helpful education in the exercise of the con-
structive powers that we may not deny them exercise.

But at this point there arises the question " What is
their worthiest exercise?" Given wealth, knowledge,
enlarged tastes, the genius of the designer, the trained
skill of the builder, art, and opportunity, how may these
be best employed ? To be sure, even in a great ware-
house there is a chance for such constructive skill as
shall express solidity, adaptability, a certain dignified
refinement, as though the building had said, " Yes, I am
in trade, but my tastes are not at all mercenary, my
aims are not merely utilitarian." A steamship may be
so designed as to look like a hideous hulk, and again, it
may be so drawn and modelled a? to seem a very race-
horse of the sea. A house may be planned with every
convenience, and so constructed as to hold within its
walls every needed facility of eating, idling, and sleeping,
and yet be an uncouth and tasteless thing that disfigures
the landscape and offends every eye that sees it, We

The Reconstructive Power of Christianity, 125

have learned all this very thoroughly. Our domestic
architecture in America is, whatever its frequent faults,
and they are obvious enough, that which foreign critics
most praise.

But there our distinction ceases. Our institutional
architecture shows tokens, here and there, of marked
improvement, and there are halls of science and learn-
ing in many places worthy of hearty admiration. But
we have not, even here, done as yet our worthiest work,
and when we come to those ideas which should have the
noblest housing of all, the deficiency is at once the most
general and the most conspicuous. For the noblest
idea of all, I take it, is the Divine Idea, — that your
life and mine is related to a Being above us from
whom that life is derived ; that this Being is at once
Creator and Father ; that He has revealed Himself
in the person and work of His Son Jesus Christ ;
that He quickens man by His Holy Spirit ; and that to
Him who unites in Himself these powers and person-
alities, we owe our love and service, and our homage.
This, as I understand it, is Religion, — the religion
whose disciples we are and by whose inspirations
man is to be redeemed and transformed. This, if
I understand aright, is the Force of all other Forces,
pre-eminent and supreme, with the mightiest lifting
power that has ever entered the world. We turn the
pages of history, and see them scarred by warfare,
treachery, and sin. We see the horrible tread and
trend of evil, cursing, blackening, and destroying. And
over against this evil we see but one force strong

126 Waymarks.

enough to face it, to subdue it, to banish it. I speak of
the pages of history ; there is a single book which,
dismissing all others, is here enough for our purpose.
Take Mr. Lecky's History of Civilization, and read the
story of Roman decadence and Christian reconstruction.
Make every allowance that you please for the favoring
force of circumstances, and yet here was a power, so
new, so resistless, so triumphant, that not to own its
transcendent character is to trifle with facts and to
disparage our own intelligence.

At any rate, we who are here are in no doubt what

*

that power Tj^as, nor whence it was ! We are in no
doubt that to it we owe all that is best in our own lives,
and brightest in the world's future. And as little are
we in doubt, I venture to affirm, whatever may be the
not always reverent persiflage of our lighter moments,
that this power has not lost its capacity to lift men out
of their meaner selves and to transform and ennoble the
race. The earlier formulas in which especially our
American forefathers were, many of them, wont to
state their beliefs and transmit their sacred traditions
are undoubtedly largely disesteemed if not absolutely
disowned. The theology that was taught by men who
lived among tliese hills a hundred years ago is in many
features of it an extinct species, whose peculiarities
most people scan curiously, but disown unreservedly.
To many amiable and devout minds there is in this fact,
doubtless, much that is disquieting and alarming, and
as a consequence of it, there is unquestionably a good
deal of rash and irreverent and unsettling speech and

The Reconstructive Power of Christianity, 127

teaching. It is the law of reactions that it should
be so. You cannot reconstruct without pulling down
something, and rashness is as common in dealing with
ancient theology as it is with ancient architecture. It
requires almost more genius to restore a cathedral
wisely than to build it. But that on the whole this
process of theological reconstruction is going on among
us wisely, — that religion is vindicating its possession
of that capacity for reconstruction of which I spoke at
the outset, — of this I think no candid observer of the
situation can be in any honest doubt. The awakening
among us of what may be called the historic instinct in
matters of religious form and worship, the conception of
the Church as a Divine institution and not a human
society, the impatience of those needless and harmful
divisions in Christendom which are the fruit of self-will
and exaggerated individualism, the longing to recover
out of the past whatever is true and beautiful and good,
and to prize and venerate it for its associations as well
as for itself; the disposition to own frankly that ages
which we have been wont to despise bore fruit for God
and for humanity, and that we can afford to own and
honor sainthood and service without embracing the
errors with which they were disfigured, — all these signs
are tokens of that reconstructive process in religion
which is not indeed without its perils, but which God is
ordering and overruling, I verily believe, for His own
greater glory. When they built the beautiful All
Saints' Church in Worcester not long ago, my Right
Reverend brother, your Bishop, will remember that

128 Waymarhs.

they wrought into the walls a stone which they had
brought from Worcester Cathedral, and in the cloister
of Trinity Church in our Boston (is it effrontery for a
New Yorker to speak so of that fair and stately capital
of your commonwealth in which I think all Americans
have a genuine pride ?) there are, unless I am mistaken,
stones which were once inwrought with the fabric of
the old parish church in the English Boston. Such
incidents are symbolic and prophetic. How some of
the Puritan fathers hated the Prayer-book ! How mul-
titudes of their children and their children's children
love it ! How abhorrent to elder New England was
what we mean by the Christian year, — Christmas-tide
and Passion-tide, and Easter-tide, and the rest ! And
to-day these holy feasts and fasts are cherished in sanc-
tuaries and homes all over this commonwealth where
the beauty and blessedness of the Church idea has
come, and has come to stay. This is what I mean by
the process of religious reconstruction, — a larger vision,
a more reverent retrospect, a more dispassionate and
therefore a juster judgment, and therefore again, a more
intelligent and a more hopeful missionary activity.

And out of this it has come to pass that while we
know less than our fathers knew about the damnation
of non-elect infants, we know more of the calling of the
Church of God as a Divine society in the world, sent
here to grapple with its miseries, to uplift its fallen ones
and to conquer its sin. This is the new note of hope-
fulness which, unless I mistake its strain, rings through
all our Christian work and life to-day. We are not

The Reconstructive Power of Chrutianity. 129

dealing with out-worn superstitions ; we are not cling-
ing to exploded fables. We are feeling anew the thrill
of that fresh iraXi'yyeva-La that quickening stir of the
Spirit which as it comes once, and again and again in
the history of the race, proclaims, " Behold, I make all
old things new."

And tliis brings us to that visible result with which
we are concerned to-day, in its relations to that national
deficiency to Avliich I have already referred. I have
endeavored to indicate how the social progress of a
great people has written itself in the buildings for do-
mestic shelter, for traffic, for science, and for art, which
it has reared, and is rearing on every hand. It is a
cloud upon the escutcheon of our American fair fame,
that hardly anywhere, or at all adequately, have they as
yet been matched by buildings for the highest uses of
all. There has been, there is, a process and progress of
religious reconstruction among us, but structurally (in
more ways than one !) it has as yet by no means found
adequate or worthy expressions. Here and there, there
are one or two buildings (and it is your honorable dis-
tinction that two of them are in New England) that are
distinctly adequate for a great use, and worthy at any
rate, in some degree, of a great people. But as a rule,
in our great cities and out of them, our ecclesiastical
architecture lags a long way behind our civic, our social,
our domestic.

The peril of such a fact is greater than we are wont
to recognize. You cannot treat a great personality
or a great idea meanly without, sooner or later,

9

130 Waymarks.

coming to that condition of mind where your thinking
is as mean as your behavior. And tliat means, ulti-
mately, the death of reverence, the death of faith, the
death of religion. If our homes, our places of amuse-
ment, our exchanges, and our insurance offices are
made, as they are coming to be so widely in this coun-
try, stately and magnificent, and all the while the house
of God is left to be mean and cheap and shabby,
— be sure that our children will understand perfectly
well what we think about the whole business ! " God
is a Spirit and they who worship Him must worship Him
in spirit and in truth." Yes, most surely ; but, for the
present, you and I are in the flesh ; and unless we are
prepared to maintain that when Christ himself insti-
tuted that highest act of Christian worship in which we
are soon to unite, saying, " Take and eai;^^ ''Do this
in remembrance of me," He did not mean that our love
and faith and homage should have visible, symbolic,
material expression, — and if visible expression, then
fit and appropriate expression, — then the best and
stateliest that we have, we must give to Him!

And so I bless God that I am permitted to come here
to-day, and see in this impressive structure such sub-
stantial tokens, not of the death of religion but of its
life. Since I first came to Lenox, a stripling in the
ministry, from across the border yonder of what was
then still a part of the diocese of New York (now
Albany), the whole aspect of things here has changed.
Your honored Rector had just come here, and only a
handful of people sought among these hills for the

The Reconstructive Power of Christianity, 131

health and refreshment which they have since brought
to so many tired and overtaxed dwellers in om* great
cities. But since then, there has come to be a new
Lenox, and, none too soon, I think you will own, has
there come to be a new and worthier Trinity Church.
I venture to think, dear brethren, that you who have
built it will not sleep less peacefully under your own
roofs because now you have seen to it that the house
of the Lord doth not lie waste ! I congratulate you, my
dear and right reverend father, as Bishop of the Diocese,
and you my reverend brother,the Rector of this parish,
upon a result so substantial and gratifying. The faith-
ful ministry which has gone in and out among this
people for more than a quarter of a century finds its
fitting recognition in what those, mainly, who are stran-
gers and not home-born, have done for this parish.
Many of them my own people, — children of the diocese
of New York, and for a time more than one of them
bound by a still closer tie, and others not of our own com-
munion, nor all of them dwellers in the great city which
some of us call our home, — all these have left on these
walls and in these windows, " richly dight," the costly
evidences of their generous and large-hearted interest in
this church. It is a happy ordering that it should be
so. " I believe," we have said together this morning,
" in the Communion of Saints." I look for the resur-
rection of the dead and the life of the world to come ;
and tliis chancel, yonder tower, and all that cost and
toil have wrought and expended here proclaim that
faith ! God be praised for the integrity of purpose

132 Waymarks.

which has planned and labored here, and which has
builded honestly and solidly, as the old cathedrals —
not alone where the eye of man can see, but where alone
the eye of God sees. God be praised for the love and
gratitude that have wrought themselves into all that,
in whatsoever way, has gone to make this holy and
beautiful house more fair and meet. Said one who not
long ago reared in this beautiful valley of the Housa-
tonic another costly sanctuary, speaking to a friend of
his the other day, " Nothing that I have ever done gave
me so much pleasure as that ! " I can well believe it !
It is a great honor and privilege to build, not for man,
but for God.

That privilege has been given to you. May God make
it the portal of many others. " This," cried Jacob at
Peniel, " is none other than the gate of heaven." May
many a tired heart and burdened soul that kneels
within these walls find it to be so here ! And out
from these walls may there go forth a saintlier manhood
and womanhood, strengthened and upbuilded here, to
bless the wastes that lie about us, to preach Christ
by loving sacrifice and service for their fellow-men,
and so to bring more near the day of His eternal
triumph.

THE NEEDS OF A LIVING CHURCH.

Divided by their differing political allegiance, the people
living to the northward of the river St. Lawrence and the
Great Lakes, and those whose home is south of it, have never-
theless much in common. There is not the same all-prevail-
ing language, for, in Canada the French colonists have
retained their ancestral speech, and with it man}^ of their
ancestral customs. But with this exception, the identity of
speech, religion, and usages is extensive, and in many ways
identically influential. Especially is this true of those in
Canada whose traditions connect them with the Church of
England, and whose intercourse, therefore, with their eccle-
siastical brethren across the American border has been inti-
mate and affectionate. The problems with which Churchmen
in the United States have been called to grapple have been
largely those which have confronted their Canadian brethren,
and the fact that more than one American presbj'ter or
bishop has been called to a Canadian episcopate is sig-
nificant indication of a confidence in American men and
methods, as adapted for the accomplishment of Church work
even upon a soil which owns the sovereignty of an English
queen. In the organization of her synods and dioceses
American rather than Anglican models have largely been
followed by the Canadian Church, and though, originally,
Canadian bishops were appointed by the crown, they are
now, as in the United States, though not in precisel}^ the
same way, chosen by a synod in which clergy and laity,
though voting by orders, sit together.

Nor is this indeed surprising. The conditions of the
Church's life on either side are largely the same. On our

134 Way marks.

own, it is true, the original prejudice against the Church
was stronger than it ever could have been in Canada; and no
one will quite accurately appreciate the hindrances which
Churchmen in the United States have overcome who fails to
reckon in the dull dislike, in some cases, and the more
active antagonism in others, with which during the earlier
days of the republic all endeavors for Church extension were
met. A profound distrust of the Church's aim and a not
unnatural suspicion as to the motives of a communion pre-
viously so closely identified with that civil powder which
strove to smother the life of the infant republic and to
reduce it by force of arms to its previous vassalage, — an in-
tense Puritan antipathy to its doctrines and worship, and a
wide-spread disbelief, not alas, wholly without foundation in
those earlier days, as to the genuineness and reality of its
spiritual life, — all these things conspired to make a task
which was difficult enough in Canada all the more difficult
in the United States.

But substantially, as has already been intimated, the task
was the same. In a time and among a people who, in either
country, were much exhorted, but not always or often wisely
taught, — under conditions in which temporary religious ex-
citement was made to do duty for calm and faithful instruc-
tion, in places where there was indeed a ministry of the
Word, but wide-spread neglect of the sacraments, where
there was need not alone of a zealous, but of a learned min-
istry, and where not more, perhaps, but not less, certainly,
than anywhere else, there was the urgent necessity of an
active, intelligent, and co-operative laity, — the requirements
of a living Church whether in Canada or in the United
States, have been largely the same. The sermon which fol-
lows was an endeavor briefly to emphasize some of them, and
w^as delivered at the Cathedral in London before the Synod of
the diocese of Huron, June 19, 1877.

IX.

THE CHURCH'S NEEDS.

And the Apostles and Elders came together to consider of
this matter. — Acts xvi. 6.

Whatever may be our various theories of Holy Orders,
we are all agreed, I presume, that the Apostles who are
mentioned in these words were exceptional men. What-
ever measure of inspiration and guidance the Church
and her priests and chief pastors have enjoyed in later
days, it can hardly be doubted that it has been in every
way inferior to theirs. The men who laid the founda-
tions of the Christian Church were men who had been
girded for their work by rare and exceptional endow-
ments. Whether we look at their personal characters,
or their official careers, we feel instinctively that we are
in the presence of extraordinary and transcendently
gifted men. Theirs were mighty powers for a mighty
work.

And yet it is instructive to find that even, these men
did not dispense with the help which comes from mutual
counsel and conference. Called as they were by excep-
tional experiences to an exceptional office, — guided, as
they had a right to believe they would be, by the especial
manifestations of the Holy Spirit, — they yet turned from

136 Way marks.

the strain of separate and isolated responsibilities to the
help and comfort to be found in fraternal intercourse
and mutual counsel. Their work was vast and urgent
and vital, but they unhesitatingly put it aside, and bid
accustomed duties wait while they paused to confer
with one another. They recognized the wisdom of
mutual deliberation and of combined action ; and in
this, one of the earliest of the infant Church's councils,
they have set an example for all churches and for all
times. We do well, therefore, that we are here to-day
to follow it, and that from the grave and urgent work of
the Church, in so many and such various fields, this
thoughtful body of clergy and laity — the representatives
of the Church in this young but powerful diocese — has
come together to deliberate and confer anew. Through
the kindly courtesy of your Bishop it is the province of
a " stranger from across the border " to stand in this
place and to give you this greeting. If he does so with
something of diffidence, and something more of sell-
distrust, he does so, nevertheless, with this inspiring
consciousness that, after all, his work and yours are
one ; that his most sacred traditions and most venerable
sanctions are drawn, as are yours, from the same re-
vered mother, — that mother whom John Winthrop,
Governor of Massachusetts, writing in the sixteenth
century, called, " Our dear mother the Church of Eng-
land, to whom we owe a long course of loving watchful-
ness and care." It is true that the Church in Canada
and the Church in the United States exist to-day amid
very different civil conditions and under widely dissim-

The Church's Needs, 137

ilar political systems. But theirs, thank God, is a
dearer bond than any begotten of the State, and a closer
sympathy than any that kindles at the sight of a flag.
It is the sympathy begotten of a common faith, a com-
mon language and liturgy, and a common ministry and
sacraments. As an American Churchman stands in
some ancient English minster, awed by its majestic
proportions and its chastened and venerable beauty, he
finds himself reminded of the legend of that young
artist of Padua, who, standing before a masterpiece of
RaphaeFs, cried out in irrepressible pride, " And I too
am a painter." For then it is the impulse of such a
one, though he may stand upon English soil for the first
time — yet remembering who are his ancestors, and
from whence have come his literature and his religion
— to cry out with equal warmth and pride, " 1 too am
an Englishman." Even so when we, who live to the
south and east of the lakes and of the St. Lawrence, find
our way north and west, as we gather in some such
holy and beautiful edifice as this with brethren of the
same Scriptural faith and apostolic order, we too are
tempted to exclaim, " Ours also is an Anglican mother
and an English prayer-book ; ours the blessed heritage
through those pure and reformed standards of the one
Lord, one Faith, and one Baptism." And though, if you
who are Canadian Churchmen should choose, with the
men of Israel of old, to protest, " We have ten parts in
the king, and we have also more right in David than
ye," we could not venture to gainsay you ; yet still I
think you will not refuse to own the closeness of the tie

138 Waymarhs.

that binds the two Churches together, nor upbraid me
for here recalling it.

I confess that I do so with a motive. This oneness of
sonship and lineage, of faith and order, is but a simile
of that other identity of our circumstances and work.
Your Church in Canada and ours in the United States
are, each of them, conditioned by various accidental
differences of circumstances and surroundings, which
give them certain features of obvious unlikeness. But
when you have made allowance for these, there remain
other and substantial resemblances in those circum-
stances which are far more important and influential.
Yours, for instance, like ours, is a new country and a
comparatively virgin soil. The Christian civilization
which you are contributing to rear in this diocese is,
like ours, embarrassed by no traditional influences of
the people and the soil. On the other hand, yours, like
ours, is a population gathered by immigration from
many lands and widely different races. The German,
the Irishman, and the Negro jostle one another in your
streets as they do in ours ; and with you, as with us,
there is the same eager race for wealth ; the same too
common impatience with modest means and uneventful
experiences. The same bracing breezes (dry, searching,
and exciting) that have made, as scientists tell us, of
the phlegmatic Old Englander, the restless, nervous,
interrogative New Englander, blow across your hills and
valleys that blow across ours, — indeed, in their eastward
progress from the great lakes and the Rocky Mountains
they reach you first. In a word, the conditions under

The Church's Needs. 139

which Churchmen in Canada and in the United States
are called upon to do their Master's work, and build up
the Church's walls, are much the same. And, therefore,
if I speak on this occasion of some of the Church's needs,
as we have learned them in New York, I think you will
own that they are no less her needs as you have learned
them in this newer London.

I. And first among them (as one who speaks to
brethren, many of whom have been clothed with the
same priestly office) I would venture to name the need
of an educated and thoughtful ministry. It is the glory
of our mother, the Church of England, that while she
does not despise the simplest and homeliest phraseology,
she yet bids her ministers arm themselves for their high
tasks with those weapons of an ample learning and a
genuine scholarship, in which she has always been so
rich. And it is to-day her pre-eminent distinction that
the products of the literary labors of her sons do more
if not to shape, then to stimulate the religious thinking
of our time, than all other influences put together. An
eminent divine of one of the most influential religious
bodies in the United States said to me not long ago,
" When I am asked ' to what living literature I am most
indebted,' I do not hesitate to say 'the literature of the
Church of England;' there is nothing like it in Ger-
many or anywhere else." And there is nothing like it.
Whether we take the Bampton Lectures of Liddon or
the Sermons of Mozley, and other volumes which I
might name, holding the same rank, what nobler evi-
dence could the Church of England give us that she is.

140 Waymarhs.

as of old, the friend of learning and of learned men, —
tlie mother of teachers, and the source and fountain of
profound attainments and a devout scholarship ? But
from what has all this come ? It has come from those
wise provisions in her system which afford to her clergy
both the leisure and the opportunities for study and for
reflection ; and it is one of her chief dangers in this
hurried and utilitarian age that, from a false spirit of
economy, or from a mistaken estimate of the real value
of such a ministry, she will so abridge their opportuni-
ties and so increase the demands upon them, as to make
such distinction in learning and thoughtfulness no
longer possible to her clergy. Says Dr. Farrar, Canon
of Westminster, and lately head-master of Marlboro, in
a recent King's College lecture on Jeremy Taylor : —

"To the acquisition of such a learning as was Jeremy
Taylor's, this age — hard, exacting, jealous, without concen-
tration, without self-recollection, without leisure; utilitarian,
mistaking a superficial activity and a worrying multiplicity
of details for true, deep progress; quite content with vapid
shibboleths, archaic ritualism, or emotional emptiness; jeal-
ous of a labor which, because it is retired, is mistaken for
idleness; and robbing every one it can of all means for the
exhaustive pursuit of learning — is wholly unfavorable.
Two hundred years have passed since the publication of the
'Liberty of Prophesying;' and we are still quarrelling
about copes and chasubles, and making it a matter of im-
portance whether the sacramental bread should be cut round
or square. When men are absorbed in such controversies,
and, above all, in the grinding littleness of endless and
elaborate agencies, often wholly disproportionate in number
and in the toil they involve to any possible good which they

The Church's Needs. 141

can achieve, there is little possibility of a learned clergy,
— there is indeed a fatal certainty that such will not be
produced."

Yet, in spite of such an indictment, there are still
in the Church of England some quiet nooks, some calm
retreats, where one may read and digest and think.
But how is it among ourselves, whether in towns or out
of them ? How manifold and how engrossing are the
cares which are bound upon the clergy, over and above
their distinctly ministerial duties ? How often is the
whole financial system of a parish made to rest upon
the clergy V Who beg or borrow the money that builds
our churches ? Who superintend their construction and
erection, and care for the " fabric " after it has been
reared ? Who train our choirs and organize and largely
vitalize our schemes of parish w^ork ? Who drudge,
often with hand as well as brain, in the discharge of a
thousand petty details, to which the ministry was not
called, and on which, verily, it has no warrant for wast-
ing itself ? God forbid that I should seem to discourage
any pastor from cordial co-operation in every laudable
undertaking, but I appeal to the experience of the clergy
whether there has not often come to them the sense that
they were frittering away their lives upon countless
secular minutiae, which are almost as remote from the
tasks to which by their ordination vows they were set,
as would be dancing or fox-hunting. There is many a
clergyman in our day who finds it impossible to spend
five hours in the week in his study. He is set to be a
teacher and guide to others, and yet in an age which,

142 Waymarhs.

more tlian any other that has gone before it, challenges
the clergy to the production of their best weapons and
their utmost strength, such a one finds himself going
into the pulpit on a Sunday morning with a string of
commonplaces at once vapid and impotent. I know it
will be said that the Church and the pulpit in our day
want some other things more than they want learning
and thought; and I freely grant it. The Church and
the pulpit want most of all in her ministry sanctified
character, — souls on fire with the love of Christ, and
longing to reach and rescue those for whom Cln-ist died.
But while the Church most truly wants awakened and
deepened feeling, she wants something more besides.
To give feeling its due influence it must rest upon pro-
found conviction, and in order that conviction may be
profound it must rest in turn upon reasonable and intel-
ligent foundations. There is a certain chastened and
affirmative earnestness in the pulpit which is perhaps
more impressive than all other things combined ; for it
gives you the impression that he who speaks is saturated
with a sense of the certainty and authority of that which
he preaches. But one can never be so penetrated with
the profound sense of a truth until he has searched it to
the roots and viewed it in every light. Earnestness of
feeling is, verily, not without its value ; but when it has
awakened a corresponding earnestness of feeling it must
be prepared to answer the questions which that awak-
ened earnestness will inevitably provoke. We may wish
that we were back in those simpler days when learning
was the property of a class, and when the people took

The Church's Needs, 143

the teaching that was given them with simple and un-
questioning faith. But wishing will never bring those
days back again ; and meanwhile our business is rather
to readjust ourselves to the new conditions amid which
the Church finds herself. If it is said that she must
meet the too common tendency to a relaxed faith merely
by a louder reassertion of her ancient symbols, 1 answer
that this is to repeat the error of Rome in the decrees of
the Vatican Council, without the splendid discipline and
consistent traditions of tlie Church of Rome to warrant
it. Ours is a Church which stands as a witness to the
freedom of the right of enquiry, and we shall never
successfully stifle that enquiry by despising or ignoring
it. On the contrary, the Church must meet living ques-
tions with an intelligent and generous candor, and must
answer the assaults of unbelief with a might and learn-
ing at least equal to theirs by whom such assaults are
made. It may be that we suppose the critical and
scientific scepticism of our time to be unknown to the
great mass of those to whom in this land the Church is
called to minister ; but if we do, it is because we do not
take the trouble to read the books and look into the
magazines, which are bought and read nowadays by
everybody. Do we forget that one man of genius in our
day has written a novel to prove the moral identity of
our own race with that of the races below it ? Do we
forget that one of the cleverest serial stories of our day
is aimed obviously against a theology which, though I
do not hold it, has had more than one eminent and
learned disciple in our Mother Church, yours as well

144 Waymarks.

as ours? Do we realize that girls and boys read and
ponder such teachings just at an age when their minds
are most susceptible and most alert ? And meantime,
what are too many of us doing, but heating the old
broth over again, or firing blank cartridges at the ghosts
of errors which are alike dead and forgotten ! Surely it
must be owned that something else is called for in our
day, and that somehow the Church must meet so obvious
and pressing a want. How shall it be done ? How shall
we secure a learned and thoughtful clergy ? In Canada
and in the United States alike, the Church has no
venerable endowments, no ancient seats of learning, no
income-yielding scholarships or amply-paid Cathedral
stalls for her clergy, — nothing, usually, but the parish
glebe and the modest parsonage, and an endless round
of hard work, poorly and often irregularly paid. It is
true, it will be said, that upon the clergy are imposed
innumerable burdens which do not really belong to
them. It is true that they are distracted by engage-
ments and fretted by details which make it simply im-
possible for them to obey the injunction of their Bishop
at their ordination, to " draw all their cares and studies
' one way.' " But how, it will be asked, do you propose
to better this state of things, not later and elsewhere,
but here and now ? I answer that we are to do so, if at
all, by borrowing the wisdom of those who are about us.
This wisdom, as it has illustrated itself in the history of
almost every communion in this land, but especially of
that one which, of all others on our side of the line, is
the most numerous and well organized, consists in de-

The ChurcKs Needs. 145

veloping and utilizing the effective co-operation of the
laity. And this brings me to the second of those needs
of the Church in our day of which I would speak this
morning.

II. It has been said somewhere that we, in our
communion, profess to believe in three orders of the
ministry, and falsify it by being content with two ; and
unfortunately the charge is true. We have bishops and
priests in our day ; but we have no deacons, — or if we
do have them, they are not in any sense the representa-
tives of a distinct office, performing a distinct function,
and ordained for a particular work, but simply presby-
ters in a chrysalis state, with an impatience to be ad-
vanced to that good degree of the priesthood which is not
always quite consistent with their having earned it. Said
a learned and venerable pastor in my hearing not long
ago : " We have no longer any deacons in the American
Church. They have so large a sense of their own dig-
nity, and so scanty a respect for authority, that I have
reached the conclusion that they must all be archdea-
cons." And the worst of such a sarcasm is that with us
it is so often and so largely true. The pressure of new
fields ; the frequent disposition of parishes to prefer
young men, whose energy is not always, however, a
sufficient compensation for the blunders of their inex-
perience ; the spirit of our age, impatient of subordina-
tion, and too eager to rule to be willing to learn how by
consenting to serve, — all these have conspired to make
the diaconate, at least in our brancli of the Church, only
a hurried novitiate, hurriedly entered and quickly ter-

10

146 Waymarks.

minated. As we turn back the pages of ecclesiastical
history, we read that at the time of the Council of
Chalcedon there were some forty deacons in Edessa
alone, and that Constantinople had over one hundred.
We read of them as a permanent and distinct office,
sometimes combining tlie exercise of their ministry with
some secular calling in which they were engaged, and
because of their closer contact with the people, acting as
guides to the presbyters in the ministration of relief to
the sick and destitute, and in the exercise of discipline
toward the profane and irreligious. And as we read of
such things in other days it is impossible not to wish
that we might reproduce them in our own. How invalu-
able, especially in fields in which the ministrations of
the presbyters are more or less itinerant, to have a
resident deacon, who could maintain the services, visit
the sick, look up the wandering, and, like the first seven,
have charge of those collections made for the charitable
ministrations to widows and others. Indeed the diffi-
culty is not to see how such an officer in the Church
might be usefully employed, nor how a perpetual diaco-
nate might increase the efficiency of her ministry, but
rather to avoid such exaggerated demands upon the
office as shall lead to its practical extinction. Of course,
if we will persist in laying upon the diaconate all the
burdens of the priesthood, there can be no reason why
it should not take the rank and responsibilities of the
priesthood. The problem is how to develop a class of
devout and earnest men who shall be clothed with re-
stricted powers and authority, and set to do a restricted

The ChurcNs Needs. 147

woi'k ; and how, when necessary, to unj^e such an office
with a secular calling. If it is said that such a thing
cannot be done, it is enough to answer that in the
Methodist communion it already has been done. One
of the founders of that communion in this country was
Elisha Hedding, for many years its senior superinten-
dent or bishop. It was my fortune, a few years ago, to
stumble in a strange house upon his biography ; and if
one would know what Methodism in this country owes
to what are called " local preachers," he will do well to
read that volume. It shows what vast results may be
accomplished by persons clothed with restricted powers,
if only they are wisely chosen and prudently employed ;
and it points to an agency which, in our pioneer work in
this continent, is almost indispensable.

But if we cannot have it, — and experience would
seem to imply that we cannot, — then we must have
that thing which is nearest to it : I mean a more cor-
dial and a more general spirit of lay co-operation. At
present it would seem that the laity has but one function
to perform, and that is the function of contributing of
its means. Our Sunday-schools, our parochial societies
elicit, it is true, a certain measure of lay co-operation,
but usually only from the very young. For some un-
known reason, it seems to be accepted that just when a
layman has reached that ripeness in years and experi-
ence which fits him to instruct and counsel others, he
ordinarily ceases to do so. " Pure religion and unde-
filed," declares the Apostle, " is this, to visit the father-
less and widows in their afflictioyi^^ as well as to keep

148 Waymarks,

one's self " unspotted from the world." Is this only a
duty of the clergy ? Is all other activity, save activity
in one's week-day business, excluded from the New Tes-
tament conception of Christian living ? Has not every
man received some gift ? And are not men bidden to
" minister the same one to another ? " If there is one
thing more striking than another in looking at the con-
dition of the Church to-day, it is the disproportion be-
tween the gifts and opportunities of the laity and their
exercise. In other days, when the priestly class was the
only learned one, it was fit and natural that to them
should be confined the missionary work of the Church ;
but in our time, when learning and books are the equal
inheritance of the laity as well, there is a definite re-
sponsibility that goes along with them. Who can speak
to one immersed in business with such directness and
efficacy as some companion who from practical experi-
ence has touched the core of the same temptations ?
Not long ago, you will remember, there was a proposi-
tion looking to the admission, under certain restrictions,
of laymen in the Church of England to its pulpits. I
confess, for one, I cannot but feel that the dangers of
such a plan, if dangers there are, would be far more
than counterbalanced by its advantages. But if tliis
should be otherwise, there is no layman among us who
may not wisely remember that it does not need a pulpit
in which to serve Christ and His Church. The Church
calls for many varieties of service from her loyal laity,
some of which are directly in the line of their secular
training. To relieve the clergy of anxiety for the

The Church's Needs. 149

financial administration of their parishes ; to give per-
sonal help to the due order and decent maintenance
of the Church's services ; to visit the destitute and
gather in the stragglers and instruct the ignorant, —
all these are tasks which are within the reach of the
most modest and retiring ; and suffer me to say that it
will not be until we have elicited such a spirit of co-
operation that the vast arrears of the Church's work can
at all be overtaken. That conception of the Church which
regards the clergy as called to do her work, and the laity
as called to sit and watch them do it, is not more false
than it is impotent. Above all this passive theory of
the Christian life, which makes the individual disciple a
sponge to absorb sermons and services and pastoral
visits, an ecclesiastical leech crying, " Give, give ! " and
yielding nothing back, — this is a theory which means,
to the soul that acquiesces in it, only spiritual dyspepsia
or paralysis. It is an open question whether there is
not too much preaching and ministering, in view of the
meagre outcome of answering endeavor and activity.
To be continually listening to arguments and exhorta-
tions which lead to no fruitage of Christian activity, —
this is not merely negatively but positively evil. Out
of it there comes, sooner or later, a dismal sense of
unreality, which hardens the hearer and paralyzes or
disheartens the preacher ; and therefore the co-operation
of the laity in every form of the Church's life becomes
essential alike to their own spiritual life and the lasting
efficiency of the clergy. Even apostolic hearts would
have fainted and faltered if, in the first ages of the

150 Waymarks,

Church's work, it had not been for the Aquilas and
Priscillas, whose loving labors so cheered them.

III. ^ I know what will be said by a great many hon-
est and earnest men and women in all our congregations
when we come to them with this plea for an increased
activity on the part of the laity in the Church's work.
It will be said that such activity implies a religious
enthusiasm which is not theirs, and which they can-
not but feel that it would be hollow and unreal to
affect. Undoubtedly of many persons this is true, and
if it is, then does it not bring us to that which is
after all the Church's most urgent want, — the deepen-
ing of her spiritual life ? Ours is an age of great
mental activity, and especially of organized activity.
The Church never had so many agencies, — so much
machinery for the doing of her work, until it has
come to be a question whether running the machinery
has not exhausted that vitality of which it was meant to
be the expression. I have heard a parish clergyman
much commended for holding seven services, including
three celebrations of the Holy Communion, in a single
day. I wish I could see their virtue. It is impossi-
ble, where there are so many mechanical duties to be
performed, that the spirit in which they are performed
should not be mechanical also ; and it has certainly
sometimes happened that our often-church-going has
not deepened seriousness or earnestness of character.
And so behind all our other needs as Churchmen and
Christian disciples there stands — I am sure there is not
one of us but is conscious of it — the need of deepening

The Church's Needs. 151

the spiritual life ; to come closer into the presence of
that Lord whom we profess to serve, until, like her who
grasped the hem of His garment with her timid but
trustful touch, virtue from Him shall quicken and
awaken us. You remember that legend of Leonardo
da Vinci, which is told in connection with his painting
of the Last Supper. As I recall it now, it runs that
when the wall of the convent in Milan on which he had
painted it was first exposed to view, the monks gathered
round the picture, eager to criticise its details and to ad-
mire and applaud its most insignificant accessories.
There were loud voices and fierce disputes, until it was
with one consent agreed that, if there was one thing
better than another about the picture, it was the draw-
ing and coloring of the table-cloth. The impatient
painter listened, with flushed cheek and flashing eye,
until the last of the order had spoken, and then seizing
his brush, with one dash of color blotted every admired
detail of the table-cloth out. He had brought them to
look upon the face and figure of Christ ; and they could
be so absorbed upon so paltry a thing as the painting of
a bit of cloth ! Even so, I think, in these days of rest-
lessness without devotion, of bustle without faith, we are
absorbed in a thousand small details, well enough in
themselves, it may be, but oh, how far removed from
the central fact of that relisrion of which we claim to be
disciples. And all the while the Master is looking
calmly down upon us, waiting until we shall consent to
withdraw our eyes from these and lift them to Himself.
For then how surely shall it come to pass that, drawing

152 Way marks,

our inspiration straight from Him, our work, our duty,
our shortcomings, will all alike stand forth in a new and
clearer light. If we are the pastors of His flock, we
shall, as we lift our eyes to Him, find ourselves moved
to feed them more diligently and lead them more pru-
dently than we have ever done before ; and, whether
clergy or laity, looking to Him we shall catch the spirit
of Him who said, " I must work the works of Him who
sent me while it is called to-day ; the night cometh when
no man can work." Show us, therefore, 0 Thou Mighty
One, first of all Thyself, and so arouse us to the work
which Thou hast given us to do."

THE CATHEDRAL IDEA.

The growth of the Cathedral idea in America is among the
most interesting illustrations of the development of what may
be called the historic sentiment in connection with religion
which have thus far appeared.

Until the latter half of the century had been entered
upon, it cannot be said that the Cathedral idea existed in
America otherwise than as a local impossibility. If there
were devout Churchmen who saw its meaning and intel-
ligently apprehended its uses, and if there were others who,
moved by the stately dignity of some ancient minster, longed
for its ennobling influences, neither of these ventured to
believe very confidently that the Cathedral apart from alien
and un-American beliefs and associations was possible in
America.

But the growth of a more just conception of the office of
the Church in the world, of its relations to wealth, to the
complex web of human society, and also of the Episcopate
to the people, produced in time a very different conviction,
and prepared the way for an appeal in the year 1887 to the
citizens of New York of which the following is a copy : —

TO THE CITIZENS OF NEW YORK.

Men and Brethren, — It was the just pride of a great Hebrew
scholar, apostle, and missionary, that he was " a citizen of no mean
city ; " and it may justly be the pride of those whose lot is cast in the
metropolitan city of America that their home has a history and
a promise not unworthy of their affectionate interest and devotion.

154 Wat/marks,

A commercial city in its origin and conspicuous characteristics, it
has yet come to be a centre of letters, of science, and of art.
Adorned by the palaces of trade, it is not without ornament as the
home of a large-hearted and open-handed philanthropy, and as the
guardian of noble libraries and rare treasures of painting and
sculpture. More and more are the faces of men and women, all over
this and other lands, turned to it as a city of pre-eminent interest
and influence, the dwelling place of culture, wealth, and of a nation's
best thought. Never before in its history was there so cordial an
interest in its prosperity and greatness ; and recent benefactions to
literature and art have shown, what earlier and scarcely less princely
benefactions to science and humanity have proclaimed, that its
citizens are determined to make it more and more worthy of that
foremost place and that large influence which it is destined to hold
and exert.

It is in view of these facts that its influence not only in the
direction of culture and art but on the side of great moral ideas
becomes of pre-eminent consequence. It is faith in these, rather than
wealth or culture, which has made nations permanently great ; and
it is where all secular ambitions have been dominated by great
spiritual ideas, inculcating devotion to duty and reverence for eternal
righteousness, that civilization has achieved its worthiest victories,
and that great cities have best taught and ennobled humanity.

But great moral and spiritual ideas need to find expression and
embodiment in visible institutions and structures, and it is these
which have been in all ages the nurseries of faith and of reverence
for the unseen. Amid things transient these have taught men to
live for things that are permanent; and triumphing over decay them-
selves, they have kindled in the hearts of humanity a serene
patience under adversity, and an immortal hope in the final triumph
of God and good.

Said a teacher of rare insight in another hemisphere, not long ago :
" What are the remains which you can study in the land of the
Caesars and the Ptolemies? The buildings devoted to the conven-
ience of the body are for the most part gone, wliile those that
represent ideas of the mind are standing yet. The provisions for
shelter, the places of traflSe, the treasuries of wealth, have crumbled
into the dust with the generations that built and filled them. But
the temple, answering to the sense of the Infinite and Holy, the

The Cathedral Idea, 155

roek-hewn sepulchre where love and mystery blended into a twili2:ht
of sunrise, — these survive the shock of centuries, and testify that
religion and love and honor for the s^ood are inextino-uishable."

For the erection of such a building worthy of a great city, of its
accumulated wealth, and of its large responsibilities, the time would
seem to have arrived. Xo American citizen who has seen in London
the throngs, composed of every class and representing every interest,
that gather in St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbev, all alike
equally welcomed to services whose majestic dignity and simplicity
impress the coldest spectator, can doubt the influence for good of
these grand and stately fabrics. Offering to all men, of whatever
condition or fellowship, the ministrations of reliirion in a lano-uao-e
understood by the common people, bidding to their pulpits the ablest
and most honored teachers, free for meditation, devotion, or rest at
all hours, without fee or restriction, they have been a witness to the
brotherhood of humanity in the bond of the divine Xazarene, and of
the need of the human heart for some worthy place and voice for the
expression of its deepest wants.

Such a need waits for a more adequate means of expression
among ourselves.

We want — there are many who are strongly persuaded — in this
great and busy centre of a nation's life, a sanctuary worthy of a great
people's deepest faith. That trust in God which kept alive in
our fathers courage, heroism, and rectitude, needs to-day some
nobler visible expression, — an expression commensurate, in one
word, with that material prosperity which we have reached as a
people owning its dependence upon God and upon His blessing on
our undertakings.

Such a building would meet, moreover, practical and urgent
demands.

(a) It would be the people's church, in which no reserved rights
could be bought, hired, or held, on any pretext whatever.

(h) It would be the rightful centre of practical philanthropies,
having foundations or endowments for the mission work of a jjreat
city, and especially for the education of skilled teachers and workers,
in intelligent as well as emotional sympathy with our grave social
problems.

(c) It would have a pulpit in which the best preachers within its
command, from all parts of the land and of various schools of thought,

156 Waymarks.

would have a place and opportunity, thus bringing the people of a
great metropolis into touch with the strongest and most helpful minds
of the age, and affording presentations of truth wider, deeper, and
larger than those of any individual teacher.

{d) It would be the fitting shrine of memorials of our honored
dead, the heroes, leaders', and helpers whose names have adorned
the annals of our country, and whose monuments would vividly
recall their virtues and services.

(e) And finally, it would tell to all men everywhere that " the life
is more than meat, and the body than raiment; " that man is, after
all, a child needing guidance, comfort, and pardon; and that he best
live's here who lives in the inspiration of an unseen Leader and an
immortal Hope.

In commending this undertaking to my fellow-citizens, I need only
add that it has originated in no personal wish or desire of my own,
and that it has enlisted the sympathies of many not of the communion
of which I am a minister. These with others have Ions: believed,
and stand ready, some of them, to show their faith by their works,
that in a material age there is a special need in this great city of
some commanding witness to faith in the unseen, and to the great
fundamental truths of the religion of Jesus Christ. Such a building
would of necessity, under our present conditions, require to be ad-
ministered by the Church under whose control it would be reared,
but its welcome would be for all men of whatsoever fellowship, and
its influence would be felt in the interests of our common Chris-
tianity throughout the whole land. It would be the symbol of no
foreign sovereignty, whether in the domain of faith or morals, but
the exponent of those great religious ideas in which the foundations
of the republic were laid, and of which our open Bible, our family
life, our language and our best literature, are the expression.

As such, I venture to ask for this enterprise the co-operation of
those to whom these words are addressed. A native of the State of
New York, and for nearly twenty years a citizen of its chief city, I
own to an affection for it at once deep and ardent. An ecclesiastic
by profession, I have nevertheless, I hope, shown myself not in-
different to interests other than those which are merely ecclesiastical
in their character and aims ; and it is certainly not the mere aggran-
dizement of the Church whose servant I am, for which I am here
solicitous. There is a larger fellowship than any that is only

The Cathedral Idea. 157

ecclesiastical, and one which, as I believe, such an undertaking as I
have here sketched would pre-eminently serve.

As such, I earnestly commend it to all those to whom these words
may come.

Henry C. Potter.

The cordial response to this appeal in quarters the most un-
expected prepared the way for initiating the successive
steps for securing a site with incomparable advantages for the
Cathedral of St. John the Divine at the corner of 110th
St. and Morningside Park in the City of New York, and of
beginning the work of securing designs and preparing for
its erection. Meantime the sermons which here follow were
preached, the one at the consecration of the Cathedral of the
Incarnation, Garden City, in the diocese of Long Island,
June 2, 1885, and the other at the opening service in the
Cathedral of All Saints, Albany, New York, on Novem-
ber 20, 1888.

X.

SEEMON PREACHED AT THE CONSECRATION
OF THE CATHEDRAL OF THE INCARNATION,
GARDEN CITY, L. I., JUNE 2, 1885.

The palace is not for man, hut for the Lord God.
1 Chron. XXIX. 7.

It was a happy ordering that, in the series of services
of which this is only one, this service of consecration
should be preceded by another. Ah^eady the tribes of
this Israel of Long Island have come up to this holy and
beautiful house and have compassed these strong and
stately walls " with solemn pomp." Already those
mutual felicitations which belong to the completion of so
noble and memorable work have here been freely
exchanged. Already, too, those suggestive historic
reminiscences which must needs connect themselves
with such a structure reared upon such a site have been
rehearsed here in words whose affluent eloquence I may
not venture to emulate. A master hand has sketched
for those who have been assembled here the memories
of the past, and the vision of a nobler future. A
humbler duty remains to him who, summoned to take
the place of another and more fit, and coming late and

The Cathedral Idea. 159

hurriedly to his task, may at least console himself with
the reflection that those words of thanksgiving to God
and gratitude for the munificence of His servant appro-
priate to this work have already been most fitly spoken,
and that those lessons of paternal wisdom which, alone,
the father of his flock may inculcate, have already been
worthily urged.

But, on such an occasion there is still something
that remains to be said, and I am free to own that I
am not sorry to be bidden here to say it. For it is im-
possible to come here for this service without being
sensible that to many minds in our generation, and
especially in this our own land, both the service itself
and the structure which is the occasion for it, are
equally an extravagance and an anachronism. We look
back from our higher civilization to other and earlier
ages which reared such buildings as this, and remember
how much these ages lacked. The age of the great
Cathedrals, we are wont to say, was, if you choose, an
age of great devotion, but it was also an age of great
and widespread ignorance. Tiie times that built
Durham and Milan, Canterbury and Seville, Lincoln
and Rouen, were times certainly of splendid gifts
and of matchless labors, but they were also times of
superstition even among the most learned, and of
semi-barbarism among the common |7eople. We may
cordially admire the enthusiasm of those earlier days,
and the stately structures through which it found ex-
pression. But it is quite consistent with such admira-
tion that we should recognize that since then fresh light

160 Waymarks.

has dawned upon the world, and that a larger wisdom
waits to guide our hearts and gifts to-day.

I. There are, we are told, new problems that confront
us in America at this hour, and the building of cathe-
drals will not help to solve them. There are new tasks
waiting for the Church of God in this land, and stately
and splendid ecclesiastical architecture is not the agency
to achieve them. " This is a practical age, and its
evils await a direct and practical solution. We want
the college ; we want the hospital ; we want the
reformatory ; we want the creche and the orphanage, the
trades-school and the trained nurse, the hygienic
lecturer and the free library, the school of arts and the
refuge for the aged, but we do not want the Cathedral."

Yes, dear brethren, we want all these things, and a
great many others for which they stand. But I venture
to submit that we want, a great deal more than we want
any or all of them, the spirit that inspires and originates
them. And if at this point we are told that that spirit
is abroad in the world, and that it is that regenerating
force which is known as the " enthusiasm of human-
ity," the altruism of the positive philosophy, then I
commend to any candid mind a recent controversy be-
tween two eminent Englishmen, neither of whom believes
in God, — I mean Mr. Frederick Harrison and Mr. Her-
bert Spencer, — and one of whom has perhaps exercised
as much influence over the thinking of his generation as
any single man now living. It was certainly not be-
cause of any enthusiasm for Christianity that Mr.
Spencer lately dealt such crushing blows at the religion

The Cathedral Idea. 161

of the Positive Philosophy. It was certainly not because
to his own vision the religion of the New Testament
appealed with such resistless spell that one of the
ablest minds in our age has confessed lately with such
pathetic candor that the enthusiasm of humanity was
insufficient for the tasks to which it has set itself ; and
his testimony at this point is therefore all the more
instructive. We may disparage Christianity as we will,
but the helpful and humane activities of Christendom
are explicable by no other key. It is because, behind all
that men are doing, whether in this or any other land,
to lift men up, there is, whether consciously or uncon-
sciously, the spell of those miglity truths which are
incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ, — the truth of
God's fatherhood and of man's redemption ; of God's
love and of man's need ; of God's judgment and of man's
accountability, — that men have suffered, and wrought
and taught, have given of their substance, and have
consecrated their lives to make this old world a fairer
home for man, and to soften and dispel its griefs. Go
where you will, ask whom you please, and the answer
must needs be the same. The hands that have reached
down to snatch the perishing from the jaws of death
and give them back to life again have been Christian
hands. The feet that have run swiftest and soonest
on all helpful and healing errands have been Christian
feet. The eyes that have seen the deepest into all
our sore and perplexing social problems have been
Christian eyes, and the lips that have spoken the
most quickening and consoling words, when all other

11

162 Wat/marks.

lips were dumb, have been those of Christian men and
Christian women.

All around us in the two cities which make one
mighty camp of tireless and heroic toilers on the side of
charity and humanity, there are those palaces of mercy
and of refuge which have already made of our American
philanthropy the wonder of the world. Who reared
them, and who sustain them ? Take out of their sup-
porting constituency the men and women who believe in
God and in His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and they
would ere long crumble to the ground. Neither the
enthusiasm of humanity, nor ethical culture, nor an en-
lightened selfishness, nor any other of those panaceas
which are offered for our acceptance in exchange for the
faith of the Crucified would sustain them for a single
generation.

But whence did they who have been moved by that
faith derive it ? Did they evolve it from their own con-
sciousness ? Did they dream it in their comfortable
leisure ? or did they learn it from the Church of God
and in the house of God ? What oracle has taught men
the wisdom to devise, and the love to toil, and the un-
selfishness to spend, unless it be those lively oracles of
which the Church is at once the keeper and the dis-
penser ? Say that men have come to own the great fact
of the brotherhood of humanity, where in all the world
have they been taugVit that fact so eloquently as when,
kneeling round the same altar, prince and peasant side
by side, they have sat at one table and eaten of one
bread and drunk of one cup ? Ah ! how the majesty of

The Cathedral Idea. 163

some mighty temple, august and solemn and still, has
taught man the greatness of God and the littleness and
weakness of His creature ! And where, in all the world,
but in some grand and beautiful Cathedral, have men
seen the splendor of things unseen mirrored so majes-
tically and persuasively in things seen ? The cathedral
an anachronism I And yet what voices have rung through
its vaulted aisles since Savonarola thundered in the
Duomo at Florence, and Lacordaire thrilled all France
from the pulpit of Notre Dame, even as Liddon thrills
all England from the pulpit of St. Paul's to-day. What
voices of warning and rebuke, what messages of hope
and pardon, have been heard within Cathedral walls ;
and what tired and aching hearts have climbed up
there upon the stairway of celestial song, and com-
muning with God, their Father, have been quickened,
and renewed, and comforted ! I do not say that
these things have not come to pass in other sanc-
tuaries humbler and less costly than a Cathedral, but
I do say that this is the office of the sanctuary in
our human life ; and I maintain that that structure
which stands for influences so potent and so supreme
cannot be too stately, too spacious or imperial, and most
surely cannot be an anachronism in any age or in any
land. It is a King's House, nay, the House of the
King of kings; it is the visible home and symbol of
all those forces that are mightiest in history and most
indispensable in our civilization. Shame on us if we be-
little its object or begrudge its splendor. Shall we dwell
in ceiled houses, decked with cedar and vermilion, and

164 Way marks.

shall the ark of the Lord dwell in a tent ? Shall our
princes and nobles, our successful men, our hoarders of
capital, and our accumulators of vast fortunes rear their
stately and regal pajaces ; and shall they and we dis-
parage the building of a palace statelier still, in which
to worship God ? Again I say, shame on us if we
do so !

II. But once more : It may be objected that such a
structure as this is an anachronism because it under-
takes to lift what may be called the institutionalism of
religion into undue and overshadowing prominence.
Granted, it is said, that we want Christian worship,
and that we want to give to God our best in offer-
ing it, the parish is the true norm of organization, and
the parish church the true home, whether of Christian
worship or of ministerial teaching. But this is not
a parish church ; it is a bishop's church, and as such it
is a dangerous illustration of the centralization of power.
May we not well be afraid that the Cathedral will over-
shadow the parish, and that the power of the one will
be the weakness of the other ? Let me say here that if
there were such a danger we might well be afraid of it.
The parochial system, whatever may be its defects, and
I am not insensible to them, has abundantly demon-
strated its adaptedness to the land in which we live and
the elements among which we of the clergy are called to
work. But one finds it hard to refrain from a smile
when he hears the Cathedral and the Cathedral system
^spoken of as preparing the way for the undue aggran-
dizement of the Episcopate. Do those who utter such a

The Cathedral Idea. 165

warning know how much, or rather how little, power an
English bishop has, ordinarily, within the precuicts of an
English Cathedral ? xind if it be urged that those an-
cient foundations, with their deans and chapters and
the rest, limiting the authority of the diocesan at every
turn, cannot be taken as the guarantees of equal safe-
guards in cathedral foundations of a later date, the
answer is simply : Why not ? Is the spirit that spoke
at Runnymede in Magna Charta, in the ancient charters
of York, and Chester, and Exeter, extinct among us
to-day ? Is a Cathedral foundation anything else than
the creation of a Diocesan Convention, with its clerical
and lay representation, its trained priests and doctors
and lawyers, its clear-headed men of business, no one of
them too eager to vote power even into the most tried
and trusted Episcopal hands ?

On the other hand, the Cathedral is a witness to the
true catholicity of the Church such as simply cannot
possibly exist under any otlier practicable conditions.
As I have said, I prize what is known as the parochial
system, and respect it heartily ; but it cannot be denied
that one tendency of a parochial system, however effec-
tively it may be worked, is in the direction of nar-
rowness and fragmentariness and one-sidedness. The
Church in the order and variety of her services, and
especially in the rhythmic sequence of her ecclesiasti-
cal year, does much to preserve what we have been
taught to value as the proportion of faith. But who of
us does not know that with the best and purest inten-
tions the disposition of any single mind is apt to be to

166 Waymarks.

emphasize unduly certain aspects of the Faith, and un-
duly to neglect or disesteem others? Who does not
know, in a word, how easy it is to fall in love with our
own pet views and to set them above all others ? We
are fond of ridiculing, good-naturedly, that custom
among Christians of other names which speaks of a
place of worship as " Mr. A.'s " or '' Dr. B.'s church."
But how is this different from or worse than that other
usage which confounds the catholic faith with Mr. C.'s
or Dr. D.'s weekly expositions of it, and which, loudly
proclaiming the ancient canon in necessariis unitas, in
dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas, nevertheless prac-
tically declares that there are no questions which are in
dubiis if one's own pet preacher has made up and pro-
claimed his mind about such doubtful questions, which
henceforth become, forsooth, no longer open questions,
but necessary dogmas, of all men, everywhere, to be be-
lieved ? For one I am profoundly persuaded that if a
Cathedral had no other vocation, it would have a very
noble and entirely adequate raison d''etre in that it offers
one pulpit, at least, in every diocese where the best and
ablest teachers, carefully and wisely chosen, may present
those various aspects of the Christian faith, whose di-
verse statements, when once they are frankly and cou-
rageously presented, will most effectually prepare men
to discern that fundamental consensus as to things di-
vinely revealed on which they all alike rest. Such a
pulpit will be a perpetual protest against '' teaching for
doctrines the commandments of men," and in its excep-
tional freedom from cramping and irksome shibboleths

The Cathedral Idea, 167

will be a very fortress of freedom for the truth as it is
in Jesus. And in sketching such a pulpit I am happy
in the consciousness that T am dreaming no fair but im-
possible dream of my own, but indicating its settled policy
as it has been already here determined upon by him
who has been called in the good providence of God to be
its organizing and executive head. The example of this
day demonstrates that even they who may have made
themselves to be widely regarded as objects of suspicion
will not be unwelcome in this cathedral pulpit, and that
here, at any rate, there shall be witnessed that essential
unity, along with apparent diversity, which is the true
glory of that Church which began in the diversities as
well as the agreements of a Peter and a Paul, a James
and a John, and which held and prized them all because
underneath them was Another who is the Chief Corner-
stone,— Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and
forever.

111. But yet again, and finally : It may still be ob-
jected that, wliile theoretically there may be force in
the considerations already urged, a Cathedral in America
is still an anachronism, because it is so essentially alien
to our national ideas and our democratic principles.
These lie, we are told, at the very foundations of our
common Christianity ; but the Cathedral is a piece of
that exaggerated ecclesiasticism which in the Old World
made of bishops and churcJi dignitaries princes and
barons, and which forgot in its lust of grandeur the
needs of the common people.

" The needs of the common people." It is a phrase

168 Waymarhs.

which, as things exist among us to-dav, and especially
in this land, may well make us pause and think ; and as
we repeat it we may well ask ourselves the question
sometimes, how far the Church of our affections is seek-
ing, first, to find out the needs of the common people,
and then to meet them. Within these limits I may not
undertake to consider that question in its broader as-
pects ; but this 1 do undertake to say, that that church
can hardly be said to be meeting very effectually the
needs of the common people which treats them prac-
tically as a pariah caste, to be relegated in her statelier
sanctuaries to the back seats, and to be made to feel in
the Lord's House that they are not honestly welcome.
I undertake to say that one need of the common people
is to have, somewhere, somehow, some substantial evi-
dence that the Church which reads in her services the
Epistle General of Saint James believes it too, and that
when she declares with Saint Peter that what God hath
cleansed that we are not to call unclean she believes
that too. Nay more, I venture to affirm that if the
same Apostle said to Simon Magus, " Thy money per-
ish with thee ! " when that thrifty capitalist proposed to
buy into the Church of God as men buy into it who buy
a pew to-day, we who claim to be of the Apostolic suc-
cession in our ecclesiastical faith and order may well
remember that that temple best meets the needs of the
common people which is free and open to all comers, of
whatever rank or caste or condition. Observe I am not
now holding any man living responsible for that system
of buying and selling so many square feet in God's

The Cathedral Idea. 169

House, which no man living created, and from which I
am disposed to believe few men living would not gladly
be free ; but I do maintain that if anything which re-
lates to the practical working of the Church in this age
is an anachronism, such a system as I have referred to
is in this nineteenth century of the religion of the Gali-
lean peasant, Jesus Christ, of all anachronisms the most
gigantic.

Turn from it now for a moment to another spectacle,
which in our mother Church of England is one of the
most suggestive to be witnessed in modern times. Has
any one within the sound of my voice to-day been pres-
ent at St. Paul's- Cathedral in London, or at Chester,
or Worcester, or Ely, or Durham, or in Westminster
Abbey, at a people's service ? Are there any such vast
and attentive congregations, is there any more vigorous
and masculine preaching, anywhere else in Christen-
dom? Do we know of tlie wonderful revival of life and
energy in the English Church, and of the spiritual quick-
ening and awakening of the English people ? 1 would
not belittle one of the manifold agencies and influences
by which that awakening has been wrought, but I declare
here my profound conviction that no one thing in this
generation has done more to rehabilitate the Church of
England in the affections of the people of England than
the free services of her great Cathedrals, and chief
among them all the services in her metropolitan Cathe-
dral, which, welcoming every comer absolutely without
distinction, and giving to him constantly and freely her
very best, has made men feel and own that she is indeed,

170 Waymarhs,

as she claims to be, the Church of the people. De-
pend upon it, we cannot afford to ignore the signifi-
cance of her example. When once we have lifted our
fairest and costliest to the skies, and then have flung its
doors wide open to the world, the world will understand
that what we say of brotherhood in Christ we mean.

And so let us be glad and thankful that this stately
and beautiful temple has been builded here, — yes, here,
and not anywhere else. The wise and far-sighted
founder of this fair city in the fields might easily, had
he taken counsel of that utilitarian spirit which rules
the age, have dedicated this site to another and very
different use. He might have built a factory (the last
letter from his hand which ever reached me was one
giving me access to the famous silk factories of Lyons),
or he might have reared here a hospital, or an inn, or a
music-hall ; and if he had, and if he had spent millions
upon some such undertaking and blazoned it all over
with his own name, who does not know how the air
would have rung with his praises as a wise, shrewd,
hard-headed, practical, common-sense man ? But he set
about instead to rear a House of God ; and other hands,
bound to him by the closest and most sacred ties, have
taken up his work and carried it on to its noble comple-
tion, not to glorif}' any earthly name, but to the glory
and honor of the Incarnate Christ ; and thus the palace
has been builded not for man, but for the Lord God.
No human creature, however worthy, will have homage
here, but only God ; and to-day we come to ask Him to
take this house and keep it as His own forever.

The Cathedral Idea. 171

Yes, and more than this ; for such a building as this
proclaims to all the world that underneath the pros-
perity of any community that lives there must be a
steadfast faith in the unseen and a steadfast faith in
Him who has revealed the unseen to us. It is on this
faith that every nation that has endured has first of all
been builded. It is in this faith tliat those peasants of
Galilee whom their Master sent to preach His Gospel
to a scornful and unbelieving generation went fortli and
conquered the world.

And if it be said they went without purse or scrip, and
that they reared no costly temples ; if, in other words, I
am reminded of what is called the simplicity '* of the
early Church," — of the upper chamber in Jerusalem, or
the unadorned proseuche that sufficed for Apostolic dis-
ciples, — I answer, I do not forget them. But neither
may any one of us forget that such was the best they
had. No more is asked from us ; but less than this no
true devotion has ever given. In ages and among Chris-
tian people where the sanctuary has been bare (as in the
case of our own land and our forefathers), so, too, has
been the private' house. But it is ever a fatal sign of art
decaying into luxury, and religion into contempt, when
men permit the house of God to be meaner than their
own, and when they allow to their domestic pleasure
what they refuse to the worship of the Maker and Giver
of all.

It is because this holy and beautiful house is the most
effectual protest against such a tendency — a tendency
to which no thinking man who knows anything of the

172 Waymarhs,

scale of expenditure for the splendor and luxury of liv-
ing in our great cities can be insensible — that we may
well hail this day and this gift of God with deep and
intelligent rejoicing. The Church in our land waits yet
to see a gift which can at all compare with it ; and while
we are here to-day chiefly to consecrate this Cathedral,
we may not forget that this sanctuary of religion is but a
part of a larger whole, — a whole whose several parts, so
wisely planned and nobly executed, demands our unstinted
admiration and gratitude. They well called in the elder
days any considerable gift for religious or charitable
purposes a" foundation." The word is most descriptive
here ; for here have been laid foundations broad and
deep for Christian worship, for Christian education, and
for Christian and paternal oversight. No dreamer is
needed here to see in this princely work, all centring
in this beautiful cathedral, the promise of quickened
diocesan life streaming forth from this gracious centre,
— a rallying-point and resting-place for all the clergy of
the diocese, an elevated type and example of the Church's
worship, a distributing centre of diocesan activities, and
a home and seat for the guiding hand and head whom
God has called here as its bishop. No dreamer is needed,
I say, to see in this work such a promise, for already its
seed is here, deep-sown with no mean or stinted hand.
May God water that seed with His grace, and so make
it to bear fruit abundantly.

It is in view of such considerations that we congratu-
late those whose work and gift this is, and bless God
that He put it into their hearts to make it. We remem-

The Cathedral Idea. 173

ber with grateful appreciation that this princely benefac-
tion comes to-day from her hand who lays it upon God's
altar unfettered by halting conditions and unspoiled by
unworthy reserve. And we remember, too, with equally
cordial appreciation the wisdom and energy that have
guided this work in its progress and brought it to its
successful conclusion. " Forasmuch as it was in thine
heart to build an house for My name, thou didst well
that it was in thine heart." " Now, therefore, arise,
0 God, into Thy resting-place. Thou and the ark of Thy
strength ! Let Thy priests be clothed with righteous-
ness, and let Thy saints sing with joyfulness."

My dear brother, and father, and friend ; ^ this con-
gregation of your own people and of mine will surely
indulge me in one word more, if I add to those other
felicitations which especially belong to this day our
loving congratulations to you. To few men is it given
to see the end of so large and anxious a work as that
which your eyes to-day behold, crowned with such ripe
success. May God make this powerful instrument for
His service rich and effectual for blessing in your wise
and resolute hands ! May He give to you and your
flock rest and peace in this holy place, and make it a
benediction to all your sea-girt diocese. Here, like a
rock above the waves, may it stand, to be a refuge and a
beacon for many generations ; and here, amid the cease-
less cares and trials, the often loneliness and sorrow-
fulness of your weighty office, may you iind strength

^ These Avords were addressed to the bishop, the Kt. Rev. A. N. Little-
john, D.D., LL.D.

174 Waymarhs.

and calm within these holy courts, and the dove-like
ministries of the Comforter. One at least of yom^
brethren — nay, why do I say one only, when 1 am sure
that I speak for all the rest ? — is glad that this happy
day has come to you and that this noble gift has come
with it. If I may speak for the mother who bore you
and whose spires we may almost see from the spot on
which we stand, New York is glad in the blessing that
has come to Long Island, and — may 1 not say it, too? — a
little proud that it has come to you from one of her own
spiritual children. If you have reckoned us your debtors
in the past, you will surely own that the debt is cancelled
to-day, and that with no niggard hand. For if this is,
after all, but the gift of one, behind it are the hearts of
all ! Truly the lines are fallen to you in pleasant places,
and you have a goodly heritage. But none too goodly
is the shrine for that Eternal King whose glory we pray
may henceforth and always fill it. As we look about us
here to-day, those words of Wordsworth's spring un-
bidden to the lips : —

" Tax not the royal saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the architect who planned,
Albeit laboring for a scanty band
Of white-robed scholars only, this immense
And glorious work of fine intelligence.
Give all thou canst, high heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less or more.
So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense
These lofty arches, spread that branching roof,
Self-poised and scooped into ten thousand cells,
Where light and shade repose ; where music swells,
Lingering and wandering on, as loath to die ;
Like thouglits whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality."

The Cathedral Idea, 175

Fair is the house which art has reared amid this rural
loveliness. May God's abiding presence make it fairer
still. May weary souls, wakened out of their sleep of
sin, learn to cry with Jacob, when he came to Beth-el,
" This is none other but the house of God ; this is the
gate of heaven." And when the end shall come, then
may the Lord rehearse it, when He writeth up the bede-
roll of His saints, that many souls were ripened here for
that more glorious house not made with hands, eternal
in the heavens !

XI.

SEEMON PEEACHED AT THE BENEDICTION OF
ALL SAINTS CATHEDEAL, ALBANY, N. Y.,

NOV. 20, 1888.

/ was glad luhen they said unto me, we will go into the House
of the Lord. For thither the tribes go up, even the tribes
of the Lord. For there is the Seat of Judgment, even the
Seat of the House of David. — Psalm cxxii. 1, 4, 5.

The choice of the preacher for this day is not felici-
tous, and this consciousness cannot be more keenly
present with you who hear than with him who speaks.
If there were no other nearer in many ways to your
Bishop and worthier for such a task, it would still be
most appropriately performed by one in whose tones
there could be no suspicion of the ardor born of merely
personal interests or prepossessions. In the American
mind of to-day the question of the Cathedral is still an
open question. If there are those who believe that it is
something which may have a rightful place in our mod-
ern ecclesiastical life, there are others, and among them
churchmen, as well as those who are most remote from
the Church, who regard it simply as an anachronism,
having no good end to serve, nor any right to be. That
question cannot well be ignored this morning ; but I

The Cathedral Idea, 177

think you. will agree with me that it would best be dis-
cussed by one who was not himself irrevocably committed
to one view of it, and least of all by one whose opinions,
it may be said, may easily enough be guessed before he
has expressed them. There are those in our American
Episcopate (and one pre-eminently, whose presence here,
as primate of our American Church, must be among our
chief joys, — whose task, I believe, I am performing,
gladly discharging thus ancestral obligations incurred
long ago), who, so far as any personal interest in this
question is concerned, stand wholly outside of it. They
have not undertaken — there is, so far as I know, no
probability that they ever will undertake — any such
work as that which we are here to set forward. And
their calmer, more disinterested judgment would be of
pre-eminent value.

If, however, nothing of such a nature is at my com-
mand, I may at least offer in the place of it some words
which, though repeated to-day were most of them spoken
long ago, and which, when they were originally written,
had for their author one who certainly stood as entirely
outside of any Cathedral scheme as any bishop, priest,
or deacon in the land. Some fifteen years ago, a few
clergymen in the city of New York were in the habit of
meeting for the reading and discussion of papers on
subjects historical, theological, and ecclesiastical. I
shall rehearse this morning the substance of one of these
papers which discussed the Cathedral in America.
Whatever may be the value of the opinions it expresses,
they were not the views of an interested person. They

12

178 Way marks.

were written to promote no enterprise then present or
probable, nor to justify any scheme which was then even
so much as dreamt of. They were simply convictions
which had been reached by dispassionate reading and
reflection, and no boldest prophet would then have cared
to predict that their author would ever be likely, under
those circumstances which have since then come to
pass, to have a personal motive for attempting their
realization.

I shall do little more than substantially restate them
now, and in view of their history, I venture to think
that 1 have a right to ask that in listening to them you
w^ill elimiuate the personal element altogether. They
are not Episcopal opinions formulated to justify a line
of action already entered upon ; they were simply the
deliberate conclusions of a parish priest, derived from
impartial study and observation, and set down nearly
twenty years ago.

At that time the situation was both somewhat like
and somewhat different from that which confronts us
to-day.

On one side of the Atlantic was to be seen the gradual
dawning and development of the Cathedral idea ; while
on the other there was a characteristic impatience of the
Cathedral reality. It had been in England a period of
almost destructive criticism; while in America it was
an era of enthusiastic inauguration. On one side of the
water the cry had been, " Cathedrals and the Cathedral
system are alike failures. The venerable building of
the nineteenth century is an anachronism, and its staff

The Cathedral Idea, 179

of more or less studious, but inert, clergy an offensive
incongruity." In a Church Congress at Leeds a Dean
of Durham related that he had been the recipient of a
pamphlet entitled " What is the use of Deans ? " and,
in an admirable paper on " Suggested Improvements in
Cathedrals," he concluded with an appeal for active co-
operation in such improvements, on the ground that
nothing less than prompt action would save the Cathe-
dral system from " parliamentary attacks." In a word
the tone of English criticism was either hostile or apolo-
getic ; while, at the same time in our own land, we
were assured that the Cathedral was an ecclesiastical,
nay, a religious necessity.

Antagonistic as such opinions seem to be, they sprang,
in reality, from the same root. During the previous
years, the Church of England had witnessed a mar-
vellous revival in spiritual life. The stir of awakened
vigor had been felt through every remotest member of
the whole body ; and thus the criticism of the Cathedral
system, as it then existed in England, was at once
natural and intelligible. On the one hand it was urged,
" Here are stately edifices, not always opened, rarely
filled. Attached to them are numerous clergy, very few
of whom are resident in the Cathedral city, and almost
all of whom are pluralists. This body of clergy con-
sumes large revenues, and does very little strictly minis-
terial work. True, they cultivate learning and polite
letters, and write books, and translate Greek plays;
but over against them are clamoring the tens of thou-
sands of spiritually destitute and untaught people, men.

180 Waymarks,

women, and saddest of all, children, with whom Chris-
tian England to-day is teeming. " What," it was some-
what impatiently demanded, "is the Cathedral system
doing for the rescue of the degraded classes, the diminu-
tion of pauperism, the evangelization of the masses ? "
And the answer then must needs have been, " Not much,
anywhere ; and in more than one Cathedral city, almost
nothing at all." Was it any wonder, then, that some
people were impatient of moss-grown ruins, which, how-
ever venerable and interesting historically, seemed only
to block the onward march of the Church, and to waste
its substance in a sort of devotional dilettanteism ?
What were wanted were agencies which should not only
centralize power, but distribute it; which should not
merely gather learning and numbers, but should send
them forth again to do some effective and appreciable
work.

And so, in America, what had deepened dissatisfaction
with Cathedrals in England had called them into being.
The same sense of urgent work to be done, the same
need of organized and aggressive activities to accom-
plish it, the same want of a diocesan centre of life, a
centre Avhich should not be so much conservative as
aggressive and distributive, had led in the United States
to the rapid multiplication of Cathedrals.

That this was so, we need only look at the Cathedrals
then in existence to see. Accustomed, as many of us
are, to regard the Cathedral as an elegant and luxurious
appendage of a wealthy and venerable ecclesiasticism,
the first thing that strikes us on looking at the Cathe-

The Cathedral Idea. 181

drals which have already been reared in this land is
that they are in hardly any instance to be found in
centres of wealth and culture, where the Church is
strong, either in means or numbers. On the contrary,
most of them are to be found in communities where the
foundations of the Church have barely been laid, where
her ideas are, to the vast majority, religious noA'elties,
and where neither wealth nor numbers are in any sense
available. The dioceses in which a Cathedral, or some-
thing answering, in its design and purpose, to a Cathe-
dral, are to be found, are Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa,
Chicago, Florida, Indiana, Tennessee, Missouri, Maine,
Albany, Western New York, Central New York, Central
Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Possibly, there are
others, but I do not know them. Now with two or
three exceptions none of these are among the older and
wealthier dioceses of our Church. On the contrary, but
yesterday some of them were not dioceses at all, but
unorganized missionary jurisdictions, hardly explored,
and equally bare, so far as Church work was concerned
of men and means. Nay, even to-day at least ten out of
these fourteen dioceses are missionary dioceses, in such
a sense at any rate that our Church in them is not
strong enough to dispense with constant and consider-
able contributions of both men and money from without.
How came the Cathedral to be organized in such dioceses,
unless the men who have been called to the administra-
tion of their affairs, found such an agency indispensable
to the prosecution of their diocesan work ?

To this it has indeed been answered that the existence

182 Way marks.

of the Cathedral in many of our newer dioceses proved
only that slavish devotion to Anglican patterns from
which neither American bishops nor presbyters have
been wholly free ; or, that it illustrated merely that
American passion for a pretentious nomenclature which
would fain dignify every clapboard chapel with a stately
and sonorous title, — that passion, in other words, for
covering up meagreness of resources and poverty of
efforts with ecclesiastical parade. But such an answer
carried with it a very grave imputation, when it was
considered who they were whose motive and action it
impugned. Churchmen of whatsoever school, were hardly
prepared to explain the existence of a Cathedral in Ne-
braska, or in Minnesota, or in Central Pennsylvania,
upon such an hypothesis. It was obvious that among
the dioceses which have been named were those of the
most various ecclesiastic sympathies and affiliations, ad-
ministered by bishops of the most dissimilar churchman-
ship and proclivities.

If from any of them one might have expected the
slavish devotion to Anglican models already referred to,
surely among these such prelates as Clarkson and
Whipple and Lee and Howe, Huntington and Armitage
could hardly have been included. These men and others
who might have been named were men saturated with
the American spirit, grateful, indeed — as who is not ?
— for the fostering care of that " dear mother the
Church of England " from whence we sprang (as Gov-
ernor John Winthrop, some two hundred and fifty years
ago, so filially wrote), but manfully conscious of their

The Cathedral Idea. 183

independence as a National Church, and of the supreme
need of adapting the Church's agencies and activities to
the wants of a living present, instead of wasting its
strength in disinterring and vainly endeavoring to gal-
vanize the worn-out methods of the past. No one who
had watched their work could have the hardihood to
affirm that they had not grappled with the problems of
our American irreligion in a thoroughly direct, practical,
and intensely earnest spirit. And yet, almost the first
thing that some of them did was to set about building
a Cathedral.

It was still urged, however, that such a fact simply
argued a spirit of ecclesiastical sentimentalism, which
may indeed coexist with much earnest and practical
endeavor, but which is pretty sure to characterize a cer-
tain type of churchmanship. Just as the most matter-
of-fact woman has somewhere in her a vein of romance,
so, it was said, have even moderate and conservative
bishops and presbyters, of a certain prevalent type, a
yearning for the poetry and the sentiment of a Cathedral.
There would have been something, perhaps, in such an
argument, if it had not been a task so hopelessly impos-
sible to make it fit the facts. Among our frontier
bishops, whose Cathedrals have marked the line of the
Church's advance across our western prairies, have been
some, perhaps, in whom the emotional, sentimental, or
poetical element was by no means deficient ; but the
vast majority of them have been men supremely of
action, intent upon real, aggressive, persistent work, and
to attempt to explain their Cathedrals on any theory of

184 Waymarks,

religious sentimentalism is to suggest so utter an in-
congruity as must needs provoke a smile.

No, the Cathedral, where it exists already in our
American Church, exists because it stands for a felt
want, and witnesses to the recognition, on the part of
its builders, of its definite function. It is no longer
a theory among us, but a fact ; and the comparatively
rapid multiplication of Cathedrals, especially in our
newer dioceses, would seem to imply that the want
which they were intended to supply, and the functions
which they were intended to perform, were at once real
and definite. What that want has been, we may as well
let those who have most keenly felt it tell for them-
selves. Said the Bishop of Minnesota,^ in a sermon
preached at the consecration of a Cathedral in a
neighboring diocese some fifteen years ago : —

''The Primitive Church gave to the bishop his Cathedral
Church to be the centre of all the work which ought to
cluster around a bishop's home. Our American branch of the
Church was fettered in her infancy by the ideas of the
surrounding sects. The separated clergy stood alone. Each
one grew more intensely individual by his isolation. The
bishop ivas, in theory, the centre of unity ; but he only met
his clergy once each year, and he could not know their wants
so as to be, in very truth, their father in God. There was
no diocesan unity in great plans of work; and hence many a
noble apostle has gone down in sorrow to the grave with a
broken heart. In the diocese there were as many ' uses ' as
individual tastes might weave into the service; opinions
became matters of faith, and brought party shibboleths and
party strife.

1 The Rt. Rev. H. J3. Whipple, D.D., LL.D.

The Cathedral Idea. 185

" The Cathedral Church gives the diocese what every
parish cannot give, — the daily prayer and meekly Eucharist.
No day should ever dawn, or sun go down without its incense
of daily prayer. The lonely missionary and the parish priest
and the Christians hindered from such devotions by worldly
cares, will be strengthened by the increasing worship which
here goes up to God. There was a day when men revolted
against superstition, and in their zeal for simplicity, thej-
stripped the Church to very baldness. The King's daughter
should be clothed in garments of beauty. The graceful
lines of architecture, the vaulted roof, the stained glass,
the carving of the sanctuary, and the precious emblems
of our faith, may all elevate our souls, and give us a
deeper realization of God's presence in His Church. The
law of ritual cannot be left to the fancies of the individual
priest. The bishop's watchful care will see that we do not
symbolize doctrines which the Church does not teach. Year
by 3'ear the service will become more beautiful; and it ought
to be the expression of hearts united to Christ. Without
this our beautiful ritual will be in God's sight as kingly
raiment upon a corpse. The Bride of Christ ought to be
clad in garments of beauty; but the fine linen of her adorning
is the righteousness of the saints.

^' The Cathedral is the centre of the diocese's ivorJc. Our
Lord sent out His disciples two and two. The greatest of
the apostles took a brother on his missionary journeys. How
much greater the need in these days of doubting faith! In
our western fields a bishop's life is one of deferred hopes.
He must often work without men or means. If he build
a school, a divinity-hall, a hospital, or home of mercy,
he must lay the corner-stone with praj^er, and water it with
tears, and believe almost against hope that where we are
blind to see no way God will make a way. The bishop is a
pitiable, helpless man, unless he have the loving sympathy
and the kindly aid of all his children in the Lord.

186 Waymarks.

'■^ The Cathedral is the hisJiop^s home. He is the father
in God to all his brethren. The best bishop is the truest
father. This fatherhood will deepen by daily contact with
fellow-laborers. He will have clergy with widely different
theological views ; they will have different plans and modes
of work; and he will give to all the liberty the Church
gives. 'There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit;
and there are differences of administrations, but the same
Lord; and there are diversities of operations, but it is
the same God which worketh all in all.' "

To much the same purport are words which I take
from the sermon preached on the opening of the edifice
ultimately designed as a Cathedral for the diocese of
Wisconsin, by him who was then bishop of that dio-
cese, the late Dr. Armitage. Anticipating both popular
misapprehension and the fear of local rivalries and
jealousies, the bishop goes on to say : —

*'I know that there are prejudices against the name
' Cathedral, ' and grave misunderstanding as to its meaning.
Some think it is a dangerous novelty among us, in some way
associated with extreme doctrines and practices. The truth
is that the first bishop of our Church in Pennsylvania, —
Bishop White, one of the most moderate men, — in his
memoirs, very solemnly gave the close of what would prob-
ably be his last work, to declare his conviction that every
bishop must have his own Church, apart from the parishes
under his charge. Bishop Hobart in New York soon after
tried to enlist his diocese in the purchase of a central site in
the growing <5ity, to be occupied for a Cathedral, which in
due time would be sorely needed. Had they listened to him
then, or had his life been spared a little longer, the diocese
would not now be busy, as it is, in raising $1,000,000 for the
mere site of a Cathedral. The idea and feeling of necessity

The Cathedral Idea. 187

are old in the Church in this countiy. In England, bishops
have always had their Cathedrals, although Church and State
have distorted them into warnings for us, rather than models
to imitate. The practical realization, from many causes, has
been of slow beginning and growth. But to-day, Illinois
Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Tennessee, Missouri, Maine,
Pennsylvania, Florida, Indiana, Albany, \Yestern Xew
York, — all have, in some form or other, a Bishop's Church.
And this because experience everywhere shows the same
need. Almost all are slow to attempt to give permanent
shape to the organization, and are wisely W'Orking on, leav-
ing the work to shape itself, just as we are doing. The
work is the main thing, and that can be as real in a humble
chapel, like the one we have lately occupied, as in a minster
like York ; without title and dignity, as well as with a full
staff of dean and canons and j)rebendaries, and whatever else.
''Now, the one leading thought on the whole subject
which I beg to have indissolublj" tied to this building and to
the whole work undertaken on this site is that the Bishop's
Church is for all souls, — free and open in every way to all
who desire the ministration of the Church. A parish is an
association of men who desire these ministrations, and
provide them for themselves. If they are wise and Christian,
they will make their parish a centre of influence and work
for Christ, on the community outside of their own number.
If they are selfish and foolish, they will be content to let
others provide for themselves as they have done. But the
Bishop's Church must have no restriction. The bishop is
also a pastor, and, according to the doctrine of the Church,
is sent to care for all souls within his field. And while he
will wisely multiply parishes, and rejoice in every new
congregation which is formed, he will always see the need of
having helpers and agencies and institutions, and a free and
open Church to reach those who will not include themselves,
nor even be included in those bodies. Men sometimes

188 Waymarks.

speak as if the Bishop's Church and work would interfere
with parishes, — would absorb all their energies, and bring
about a dangerous centralization. Let any one read our
canons, and see how carefully the bishop's power is restricted
on every side, and he will hardly fear that. And his
Cathedral work will only supplement that of the parishes.
The parishes being united in the diocese, and so in the
Cathedral, will find there, as results of their combined gifts,
perhaps means and agencies which no one parish can provide
itself. The diocese will be the gainer for the training of its
workers, both clerical and lay, which will naturally be
given in the Cathedral, and the bishop can thus properly
command a constant supply of helpers in the diocesan
Church, which he could not set in one parish in preference to
others. Let it, then, be understood that what is here is not
the concern of a single parish or congregation, but a general
work for the good of all. There will be, of course, a regular
body of worshippers here ; but all worshippers are welcome
whenever they will come. For the support of the work we
depend entirely on the willing offerings of the people. We
ask all who will be regular worshippers, and as many more
as will join them in this, at least, in order that we may have
some basis of income from which to gauge our expenditure,
to pledge a minimum sum which they will give statedly to
our work. We shall need the united and self-denying gifts
of us all to carry it forward with our increased expenses. I
hope we shall not need to say much about these con-
tributions; for I trust that the spirit is growing among us
which will make every one glad to give money and time and
work to the Lord. And more direct gifts can hardly be
made to Him than in this work, v/hich pays no human being
a dollar beyond his bare maintenance, his food and raiment;
which makes no outlays in the modern luxuries of worship, so-
called, and which is sending out from house to house, and
from soul to soul, in this community and its neighbor-

The Cathedral Idea. 189

hood, Christian men and women intent on helping and
winning for Christ, which maintains worship in three
places besides this, and here will offer frequent and various
services, to meet the occasions and opportunities of all.'^

It was because of words such as these, the fruit of the
practical experience of men whose wisdom and self-
sacrifice the Church had already learned to honor, that
your preacher reached that four-fold conviction concern-
ing the Cathedral which to-day he can do little more
than rehearse. It is this : that in an American Church
life there is a place for the Cathedral.

(a) As an elevated type and example of the Church's
worship.

(6) As a distributing centre of diocesan work.

(<?) As a school and home of the prophets.

{d) As the ecclesiastical centre of the work and
influence of the bishop.

(a) The Cathedral has a foremost function among us
as an elevated type or example of the Church's w^orship.
Our American Church allows, w4th great wisdom, a very
wdde diversity in the manner of celebrating her services.
There are congregations where the baldest simplicity
may be found, on the one hand, and the most ornate
ritual, on the other ; and these differences in the " use "
obtaining in different parish Churches contribute to
adapt the Church's services to a very various class of
worsliippers. But the unreserved indulgence of these
differences is not without its dangers. On the one hand
a passion for splendor, an aesthetic delight in cere-
monial, may carry our services to the verge of an almost

190 Waymarks.

servile imitation of rites and customs which have no
place in our reformed Catholic Church ; and, on the
other, these extravagant usages, or a desire to protest
against them, by act as well as by word, will provoke
many to an almost ostentatious neglect of all regard for
what is only decent and orderly. If a clergyman's rld-
ing-vvhip and gloves have found a resting-place upon the
Holy Table, in the sight of an assembled congregation,
it may have been in somewhat coarse and impulsive
protest against the obtrusive genuflections and abject
prostrations which had earlier been made by some other
before that same altar. And thus, as we see in fact,
differences are intensified, and a reverent uniformitv is
rendered more unattainable than ever.

But what shall prevent increasing differences and a
wider divergency of opposing customs ? It has been
wisely held that a microscopic and rigid legislation
will not do it, and it is doubtful whether anything will
wholly displace our present almost endless variety of
custom. But if anything can help to that end, it will
be a central and stately structure, where the Church's
services are rendered in their fulness and grandeur, but
with as close an adherence as possible to the Cathedral
worship of our mother Church. That worship has been
shared in for generations by men of every shade of
opinion and every variety of ecclesiastical association.
But all hearts yield to its spell, and all minds own its
dignity, beauty, and impressiveness. The most familiar
tribute to an English Cathedral service which has been
written in our day emanated from a divine of the

The Cathedral Idea, 191

Puritan school of theology, and of most rigid Puritan
descent. It certainly ought to have set us thinking long
ago, that no worship of modern days has been so
uniformly approved and prized by Christians of q\qvj
name and men of every rank as has the Cathedral
service. If such a service has in it elements that touch
the most different natures, why should we not employ it
among ourselves ; and above all why should not we have
it under conditions which would lift it to be tlie type and
pattern for the whole Church ? In England, the average
parochial worship is in every way better than ours, hav-
ing more heartiness, and, especially in the musical
portion, more of unison, than among us is anywhere to be
found. And the reason is that the Cathedral, with its
spirited services, and broad and massive effects, presents
a model toward which the parish Churches instinctively
turn. From it, these get their best musical com-
positions, their finest hymn-singing, and above all, that
noble combination of dignity and simplicity, that chaste
impressiveness and beauty, which, above all else, are
distinctive of worship in the English Cathedrals. An
American traveller may find in All Saints', Margaret
Street, in St. Andrew's, Wells Street, in St. Alban's,
Holborn Hill, the most "advanced" ritual which the
Anglican Church can produce. But he will, with per-
haps a single exception, look in vain for any exhibitions
of it in any English Cathedral. There, as a rule,
nothing is tawdry, or bedizened, or glaring; but, as in
the noble choir at Durham, the noblest architecture,
combined with the most absolute simplicity ; and when

192 Way marks.

the worshipper has joined in the services he will find
little difference between those in Salisbury and those at
Ripon, between those in Canterbury and those in
Litchfield.

Surely there is something very significant in such a
fact ; for it shows that there is that in a Cathedral
Church which tends to the avoidance of extremes and
to the maintenance of a dignified and impressive service.
And if this is true of the Cathedral in England, how
much more is it likely to be true of a Cathedral Church
which would be the living expression of the best religious
sentiment among ourselves. The manifold novelties
that are caught up here and there, and sought to be en-
grafted on the services of our parish Churches, would
find no place in a Cathedral, administered by a body of
clergy representing a common consent and a united judg-
ment and approval ; and more than this, what a mission
such an agency would find awaiting it in the musical
services of the Church! We have in our American
Churches a great deal of music that is costly, a great
deal that is florid and pretty, and not a little that is
vicious and intolerable. As compared with our Angli-
can sister, we are nearly half a century behind in the
right estimation of hymn-singing, and other much
neglected (or perverted) departments of musical wor-
ship. And what has made the difference but that in
England the choral festivals of the greater Cathedrals
and the devotion of a highly skilled and cultivated or-
der of men to musical studies and composition in con-
nection with those Cathedrals, has lifted the whole

The Cathedral Idea. 193

standard of taste and the whole scale of performance
to a far higher level than we have at all approached ?
The present Dean of Norwich, in his essay on " The
Cathedral a School of Music," observes that " it must
be remembered that music has by no means as yet taken
that position in our services that it has a right to take.
The minds of people in general are not at all disabused
of the notion that music is a mere ornamental accessory
of worship ; they have not yet at all come round to the
view that it is the highest, truest, deepest expression of
devotional feelings." ^ True as these words are in Eng-
land, it is impossible that they could more accurately
describe ourselves. In the last twenty-five years the
musical w^orship of our Church has indeed advanced to
a higher level ; but it is still in many places pretentious,
obtrusive, and bad. It often consumes more time than
of old, provokes more comment, aggravates and per-
plexes more parish priests, groping blindly and hope-
lessly, like Samson among the Philistines, for deliver-
ance from its tortures ; but it is far from what it ought
to be, and farther still from what it easily might be ; and
it will continue to be so until we have some such normal
school of Church music as the Cathedrals have shown
themselves to be in England, — having about it a prestige
which cannot be despised, and illustrating an excellence
which cannot fail to provoke a healthy emulation.

And all this the Cathedral can do Avithout the likeli-
hood of being beguiled into undue display or betrayed
into foolish extravagance. In the parish the vagaries of

1 Principles of the Cathedral System, p. 115.
13

194 Waymarks.

the individual parish priest or organist may run away
with him ; but in a Cathedral there is an impersonality
of administration which tends to restrain eccentricity
and to make mere individualism almost impossible.
True, the Cathedral is the bishop's Church or seat ; but
the bishop who administers it must be able to command
the co-operation of a body of clergy, whose various tastes
and opinions must at least greatly modify his own.
Under such a system novel customs will not be apt to
find easy admission ; and while there will be, as there
ought to be, progress and improvement in the Church's
worship, it will be progress in the direction of those
things only which have been widely and thoroughly
tested and approved.

(6) And next to this the Cathedral has a definite
function as a distributing centre of diocesan activities.
To us in America it cannot be insignificant, as suggest-
ing an example for our imitation, that the Cathedral was
called into existence for precisely that end. " It must
be granted," says the Dean of Norwich, in his recent
volume on the Cathedral system,^ " for it is a matter of
fact, that a Cathedral was in its origin nothing more
than a missionary station, where the bishop of a partly
unevangelized country placed his seat, and that the
Cathedral chapter was originally nothing else than his
council of clergy grouped around him, whose duty was
to go forth into the surrounding district with the mes-
sage of the Gospel, to plant smaller Churches which
should be subordinate or parochial centres, and to re-

1 Principles of the Cathedral System, Int., p. xviii.

The Cathedral Idea. 195

turn again periodically to the diocesan Church at head-
quarters, for the counsel and directions of their chief."
Could there be a more exact description than this of the
relation which there is (or ought to be) between a mis-
sionary bishop (and many diocesan bishops) and their
missionary deacons and presbyters ? It is the experi-
ence of every bishop that if he could command the ser-
vices of a few clergymen not settled in organized
parishes, or anchored by other ties, whom he could send
at opportune moments to improve new openings, to
maintain temporarily the Church's services, to attempt
in a tentative way, at new points, a certain amount of
Church work, some of the most promising fields might
speedily be made centres of ecclesiastical life and
activity.

A bishop, like a general, needs to have, somewhere
among his forces, troops that can readily be mobilized ;
and the bishop's Church or Cathedral is obviously the
fitting centre from which such a force may most readily
and effectively be distributed. If the diocese or jurisdic-
tion be mainly of a missionary character, then the uses
of such a staff of clergy as I have suggested are too ob-
vious to require argument ; while if the diocese be an
old and thickly settled one, with the Church well and
strongly established in its principal centres, then the
function of such a clerical staff appears the moment we
consider the urgent need there is for a body of men who
shall be distinctively employed as preachers.

The demands upon the parochial clergy are so numer-
ous and complex, the same man, in even the best ap-

196 Waymarks.

pointed parishes, has to do so many things, that, between
the pressure of Sunday and week-day schools, of paro-
chial visiting, of superintending and maintaining chari-
table enterprises, " the pastor in his study " is in danger
of becoming a vanishing memory. " It is not meet,"
declared the Apostles, " that we should leave the Word
of God and serve tables;" and many an overworked
parish priest echoes that cry; but the Church cannot
give him even a single deacon, and so he struggles on,
to the detriment of his own powers, and equally to the
detriment of his ill-fed flock, — his energies frittered
away amid a thousand distractions that leave him only
the merest fragments of time in which to store his own
mind, or to prepare himself to stand up as a guide and
teacher to his people. What an inestimable blessing to
such a man, could he feel from time to time that he
might be reinforced by some brother clergyman from
the mother Church of the diocese, whose pointed, fer-
vent, vigorous utterances would quicken and stimulate
both him and his people.

And so, too, in the matter of the charitable and
philanthropic enterprises of a diocese. If any one will
take the trouble to look over the eleemosynary opera-
tions of the Church in one of our great cities, the first
thins: that must needs strike him is the immense waste
of means and energy that invariably characterizes them.
The Church as a fact in large cities is often simply pure
Congregationalism. There is rarely the faintest pre-
tence of any common interest or effort. The city rector
looks over the wall at his brother rector with a feeling

The Cathedral Idea. 197

in which indifference and disapprobation are apt to be
mixed in about equal parts. He knows next to nothing
of his brother's methods, nor that brother of his. Each
one of them perhaps, or, at least, each half-dozen clergy-
men, have their pet " asylum " or " home," or orphanage ;
and in a community where one strong institution would
be at once a power and a blessing there are as likely as
not to be half a dozen, each struggling to exist, and each
wasting resources which, if consolidated and adminis-
tered with unity and harmony of purpose, would do a
work four-fold greater than that which is likely to be
the sum of their isolated efforts. There is no more cry-
ing need in our cities than for something which shall
unify the well-meant labors and wisely aggregate and
administer the generous benefactions which are often so
profusely laid in the lap of the Church. And where can
we look with so much hope for such a unifying agency
as to the diocesan Cathedral, with its board of trustees
representing every shade of sentiment, and its staff of
clergy including every phase of theological opinion? -
One cannot but anticipate the relief that such an
agency would bring to over-taxed pastors, no longer
called upon to carry the interests of sundry struggling
charitable enterprises upon their hearts, in addition to
the inevitable burdens pertaining to their own immediate
cure, and relieved most of all by the conviction that
money was not being needlessly expended in the main-
tenance of useless machinery only half doing work
which might be far more economically and efficiently
performed. The spirit of the present age was said, in a

198 Way marks.

recent convention of the disciples of " free religion " to
be one of " profuse beneficence." If this be so, we may-
well anticipate that it will be followed by an era of
reaction, when the popular demand will be, ^hat are
these " shelters " and " folds " and orphanages doing to
vindicate their right to such large benefactions, such
costly edifices, and such ample retinues of attendants ?
And we shall be fortunate if we do not discover, as the
result of the want of organization, and above all, of
economic consolidation in the charities of our great
cities, that, as was recently actually shown in the case
of one of them, the cost of maintaining those whom they
shelter is equal to the cost of maintaining such bene-
ficiaries at the most expensive hotel in the country.

And yet it is idle to hope for any improvement in this
state of things until we can have some central organiza-
tion, ecclesiastical in its character, and yet so separate
from and unlike the parish Church as to make it wholly
impossible that there should be any rivalry between
them and it, — an organization which, representing all
shades of ecclesiastical sympathies, will administer its
charities in a broad, impartial, and truly Catholic spirit,
aiming to build up no single parish, nor serve, nor
further the ends of any particular school or party. If
we are to find any such central organization, it must be
in connection with the diocesan Church, or in other
words, the Cathedral.

(c) Turning now to another office of the Cathedral,
there is pre-eminently a place for it in the life and work
of our American Church as a school and home of the

The Cathedral Idea, 199

prophets. "A school and home of the prophets." I
know how vague the words sound and how remote is
the thought which they suggest. In fact the modern
Church, and pre-eminently our own Church in this land,
has so largely lost the primitive conception of the min-
istry that to many the words are doubtless unmeaning.
The confusion of the priestly and the prophetic offices
has become so common, and the neglect or disesteem of
the gift of prophesying — as the bishop of this diocese
nobly witnessed in an address delivered to many of
those to whom I speak this morning on the occasion of
a recent diocesan convention — is so general, that it
would seem as if the Church had almost forgotten the
commission which her Lord gave to her. Yet she is
" built," declares Saint Paul, " upon the foundation of
the apostles and prophets.''^ The careless exegesis with
which too often we read Holy Scripture has been wont
to refer that last word " prophets " to the messengers of
the elder Testament. But what the apostle had in mind
is plain enough when a few verses later in the same
chapter he speaks of a mystery being hidden from the
holy men of old, but " now revealed to his apostles and
prophets by the Spirit." And to remove all doubt, in the
same Epistle he mentions prophets as a foremost order
of the Christian ministry. " He gave some apostles and
some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors
and teachers," — pastors and teachers for the settled
cure of souls, prophets and evangelists for the vindica-
tion and extension of Christ's gospel.^

1 Norris, Cathedral Canons and their Works, p. 38.

200 Wat/marks.

I maintain that the Church began her work with this
conception of the ministry, and that from apostolic days
to our own every great forward movement has been
marked by its recognition, and every period of torpor or
decline by its obscuration. We pass on from the first
fervor of apostolic days and we come to the monastic
orders of Saint Jerome. The thought behind that
movement was a purpose to revive the school of the
prophets. " Let bishops and presbj^ters," says Jerome,
" take the apostles and apostolic men as their models ;
we monks must look rather to Elias and Eliseus and
the sons of the prophets." ^

So was it with the forty Benedictines who landed on
the shore of Kent with the giant form of Saint Augus-
tine at their head. These men were preachers, before
all else, and supremely preachers, journeying to and fro
to proclaim Christ to men, and so vindicating their
calling as the prophets of their age. Follow up the
stream of the Church's life in our mother Church of
England. Obscured though the idea was in the Middle
Ages, it was never wholly lost sight of. Saint Chad of
Litchfield, the thirty Canons of St. Paul's with their
Dean, the Friars Minors of St. Francis, to whom the
noble Grosseteste of Lincoln looked to " emulate the
prophets of old," and to illuminate the land lying in
the shadow of death with their preaching and learning,^
the statutes of Bristol Cathedral as enacted at the Refor-
mation, one of which reads " Quia lucerna pedihus nostris

1 Ep. 58 ad PauHnum.

2 Robert! Grosseteste, Epistolse, 58, 59.

The Cathedral Idea. 201

est Verhum Dei, statuimus et volumus ut Becanus et
Canonici, immo per misericordiam Dei ohsecramus, ut in
Verho Dei opportune et importune seminando sint
seduli " — all the way along there shines forth, amid
whatever temporary loss or exaggeration in other direc-
tions marred the. progress of the Church, the gleaming
thread of this witness to the paramount necessity of
the prophetic office.

We have all but lost it to-day. There is not wanting
here and there among us an intelligent recognition of
the fundamental relation of the prophetic office — of the
preacher's calling (for when I use the one word here
I mean just as much the other) — to the Church's life and
progress. But the thing itself is rapidly becoming an
extinct species.

It must needs be so. Consider for an instant the
demands of our modern parochial life to which I have
just referred, and then ask yourself what chance there
is for the ordinary parish priest to do any real or effec-
tive work as a preacher. The most dismal aspect of
the whole business is that we have ordinarily so utterly
dismissed any smallest expectation that such a one ever
will do any serious or worthy work in fulfilment of his
prophetic office that we cannot interest ourselves in the
subject. And yet, I declare before God, and in the
solemn light of His word and all the past history of His
religion in the world, that a Church which neglects or
ignores the prophet's office and the prophet's message is
doomed to decay, to dishonor, and to death. It is in
vain that we organize societies, and build parish houses

202 Waymarks.

and multiply services ; there must be a body of men
who shall be to their age preachers, " prophets who will
cry aloud and spare not," equal to the vindication of
God's truth on higher and more public tribunes than
the parish pulpit, men of God who will step to the front
in times of doubt and difficulty ; who will take a clever
but sophistical book and cleave through its subtle false-
hoods with the Sword of the Spirit, — " men who will
speak the word for which a thousand hearts are waiting,
and speak it with the power of one who has thought
long and deeply." ^

And where are you to find such a body of men ? How
are you to train them ; from what centre shall they go
forth ? Pray do not let any one of us be guilty of the
impertinence of saying that we have gotten along well
enough without any such body of men thus far, and
that there is no need of them now. We have not
gotten on well enough thus far, and even if we
had, there are new needs dawning upon the Church
whose children we are, and it is at our peril that we
disregard or ignore them. Says Canon Westcott,^ to
whose calm judgment and matchless scholarship we
may well turn in such a matter as this, speaking of
Cathedral foundations in relation to religious thought,
" The noblest organization is that in which there is the
most complete separation of the functions of the con-
stituent parts. Step by step that which was at first
capable of manifold adaptations becomes specialized."
And again, and most significantly, " The highest develop-

1 Norris, p. 44. ^ Bishop (1891) of Durham.

The Cathedral Idea. 203

ments of society will include the largest variety of
distinct offices concentrated in different bodies." ^

Do we get the force of these words ? What is there
that has become more complex than our modern life —
its needs, its perils, its employments, its relationships ?
And we whose office it is to adjust the activities of the
Church to the living situation — yes, remember, that is
your calling and mine — what are we doing to make the
Church adequately a voice of warning, of authority, of
instruction to a perverse and evil generation ? There
must be an order of preachers and prophets, there must
be a centre of operations, there must be a directing
mind, there must be adequate training — in one word
there must be that which nothing else but the Cathedral,
not merely as a building, but supremely as an institu-
tion (an infinitely more august and important aspect of
the whole question, let me say) can adequately supply.

{d) And that brings me finally to remind you that
we want the Cathedral as the home and centre of the
work of the bishop. There is a tone with reference to
the Episcopate which one often hears in our generation
concerning which it is difficult to say whether it is
more grotesque as an anachronism or as an imbecility.
It is the tone which is fond of depicting the modern
bishop as an ecclesiastical tyrant, — self-willed, over-
bearing and imperious. Surely this ogre is a creature
simply and purely of the imagination. He does not
exist, simply because he cannot exist. The days of a
" paternal " government, in the technical sense of that

1 Essays, p. 109.

204 Waymarks.

term, are, in the history of bishops, forever ended. We
have come to the days of a Constitutional Episcopate ;
I do not need, I think, to explain that phrase to those
to whom I speak this morning. In the capital of this
great commonwealth it is eminently appropriate and sug-
gestive. A Constitutional Episcopacy is an Episcopacy
" tempered," if you choose, not by Congregationalism, or
parochialism, but by Constitutional law. Such law we
have {a) in the constitution and canons of the several
dioceses, and {h) in the constitution and canons of the
General Convention. To these the bishop is subject in
precisely the same way, and certainly in as large measure,
as the youngest deacon. And if these are not sufficient
to restrain him, it is competent to invoke, in matters that
touch the material interests of them over whom the
bishop is set, the common law. In a word, whatever
may be anybody's theory of the inherent powers of the
Episcopate, they are limited and hedged in at every
hand by the prescriptions and restrictions of law.
To these, in the administration of his office, the bishop
must have perpetual reference, and in construing and
applying them, lies a large part of his responsibility.
But, plainly enough, he needs, in so doing, counsel and
co-operation. Indeed, when a bishop enjoins anything
of a dubious character, unsupported by the voice of his
clergy, he acts on lines unknown to the primitive
Church, even as the maxim of Saint Jerome plainly in-
dicates when it says : " Let the bishop do nothing with-
out his presbyters." How, now, is such counsel to be
had ? Do you answer through the Diocesan Convention,

The Cathedral Idea. 205

or the Standing Committee ? The one body is too large
and too unwieldy ; the other is too small and too remote.
The former statement requires no proof ; the truth of
the latter becomes obvious when you remember that the
Standing Committee is made up usually, of members
from all parts of the diocese, rarely convened, and that
its members are largely engrossed with local and paro-
chial interests, which are, to most of them, not un-
naturally, supreme. What we wait for, especially in the
due administration of our young dioceses, is the Cathe-
dral chapter, to be the cabinet of the bishop, to be made
up of preachers, missionaries, rectors, canons, and
scholars, each one of whom shall have a double tie, first
to the Cathedral, and then to some mission field, to
some outlying cure, to some organized parish, to some
college, or school, or seminary, to and fro between
which they shall go upon a service regulated by rule
(Kavcov) and in all of which the bishop shall preside as
the guiding, restraining, inspiring mind. This I main-
tain is the restoration of the lost ideal of the Episcopate,
whereby his office and his seat become of paramount im-
portance to the whole diocese, as expressing and im-
pressing his influence, as binding togetlier the active
life of the diocese, not only in one polity but in one
policy, as the centre of institutions which surround the
Cathedral and grow out of it, even as in this instance,
thank God, they preceded the building of this Cathe-
dral Church.

And does any one apprehend that this will issue in
the undue enlargement of the bishop's prerogatives and

206 Waymarhs.

powers ? On the contrary, I maintain that it is at once
the wisest and safest way to limit them. No diocese
will readily consent that the Cathedral chapter shall
be other than equitably representative ; no conven-
tion will be apt to put itself in the power of a body
which does not reflect more than one aspect of thought
or one type of policy ; and no bishop, unless he be more
than obtuse to those inexorable facts which confront one
in this era of Christendom, will care to attempt to sur-
round himself with a college of advisers which shall be
pledged simply to register his own decrees. The day
for that has passed, never to return ; and yet for lack
of points of contact with his diocese a bishop may so
drift out of touch with its living interests and aims as
to be merely an isolated functionary, impotent as a ruler,
and more than impotent as a leader. 1 wish I had time
here to show how in our mother Church of England this
could be demonstrated from the usurpations of the mo-
nastic order, where the abbot thrust himself into the
place of the bishop, and where to-day the dean, who has
inherited the abbot's place and powers, has neutralized
the office of the bishop in his own seat, and stultified the
purpose of the Cathedral chapter.

But we are hampered by no such traditions. Ours it
is, if we will consent to see the need of that more ade-
quate organization of the Episcopate which the growth of
the Church demands, to create such centres of adminis-
tration in Cathedral foundations that, in addressing our-
selves to those new tasks which every day loom up before
us in such vast proportions, there shall be the due recog-

The Cathedral Idea. 207

nition and utilization of the Episcopate as the organic
centre of the Church's aggressive life.

And so I thank God for what has been accomplished
here. Noble as is this fabric both in what has been
completed and what is projected, it is but a small part
of the whole. The great idea which lies behind it, — an
idea which rescues the Episcopate from isolation, from
the errors of individualism, and so from comparative
impotence, — this is the thing of supreme consequence,
and of pre-eminent promise.

And I congratulate you, my brother, that in the good
providence of God it has been permitted to you, and to
the loyal and loving flock that have prayed and striven
and given with you, to achieve so much. I do not find
it easy to put into words my hearty admiration for a
faith which has never faltered, for endeavors that have
never tired, for a patience that -^ as I have watched, 1
may not be denied the privilege of saying even in this
presence — has seemed to ennoble your whole nature.
No one knows better than I do the difficulties you have
had to encounter. I was born and reared in what is
now the diocese of Albany, and was intimate with its
traditions long before you came to it. Some of my most
intimate and cherished personal friends are among those
who in this whole undertaking have been most remote
from sympathy with you. But they must suffer me to
say what I think they would some of them be glad to have
me say, — that your meekness and gentleness in the
face of much criticism and often opposition, your gen-
erous magnanimity under circumstances of discourage-

208 Waymarks.

ment and alienation, have, as it seems to me, only made
you more and more worthy of our common love and re-
spect. You have held to your own opinions, and have
advocated them with a courage which is worthy of all
praise ; and if you have differed with some of your
brethren, you have not suffered either the odium theo-
logicum or the a7nor Cathedralis to embitter your speech
or your temper ; above all, you have striven here, as
we rejoice to believe, not for yourself, but for God and
the honor of His Church ; and so we bless God to-day
that you have not striven in vain.

May God make this sacred shrine of your own and
your people's hopes and affections the place of his abid-
ing. May you be spared to finish what to His glory
you have so worthily begun. To this House of the
Lord may the tribes go up, even the tribes of your
Israel. Here is the seat of judgment, even the seat of
House of David. May God long spare you to fill it !
And hither, also, may there never cease to come the
burdened hearts that hunger for the Bread of Life,
and Rest and Peace, and may they never fail to find
them !

RELIGIOUS ORDERS.

No more remarkable emancipation from earlier prejudices
has taken place in the last quarter of a century than that
which has dismissed not only from the Church of England
and from its American daughter, hut from other communions
having little sympathy with either, the widespread distrust
and dislike which for more than two centuries have prevailed
everywhere outside the Roman Communion, and indeed in
some quarters within it, toward what are called ''religious or-
ders. ' ' The monk and the nun have been, not alone with sturdy
Protestants, but with many devout Church people, the syno-
nymes for fellowships fruitful only of corrupt morals, unreal
devotion, and indolent mendicancy. The disfigured pages of
mediseval ecclesiastical history, — disfigured by records of mo-
nastic luxury, cruelty, and vice, which are witnessed to far
more impressively and conclusively by the saintly endeavors
of the Port Royalists toward reform than by any testimony
submitted by the commissioners for the suppression of monas-
tic houses, under the authority of Henry VIII., — records
such as these created a hostility not only to the monastic
idea, but to everything for which it stood, which not a
great while ago was generally regarded as radical and
inextinguishable.

Two influences have conspired to reverse that decision, or
if not to reverse it, to qualify it. The first has been a more
intelligent discrimination between the evils and the excel-
lences of religious orders, and the second the pressure of
those complex exigencies which are the distinctive character-
istic of our modern life.

14

210 Waymarks,

In regard to the first of these, there will always be those
who will believe that there can be no such thing as celibate
orders, whether of men or women, bound together for devo-
tional and beneficent purposes, that will not always be in
danger of the evils which at the Reformation period flaunted
themselves throughout Christendom. But it may be an-
swered to this that almost as much as this may be said of any
institution in human society ; so that the question simply
arises whether the evil tendency in such orders is too great
to be restrained or overcome. Still further: It may rightly
be urged that, until it is demonstrated that religious orders
and their evils are inseparable, to dismiss the former on ac-
count of the latter is simply begging the question. And yet
again : It might rightly be argued that modern society, with
its unique and unprecedented exigencies would seem to be
creating a situation and with it a demand for which religious
orders furnish the only appropriate suppl3\ A recent writer^
has shown in a very interesting way how the growth of mo-
nastic houses in England, with their accumulated lands and
revenues, was partly due to the drift towards them in ages
when the world had no use for men who were not warriors, of
those gentler spirits, refined, shrinking, lovers of letters, of
art, of religion, above all, in noisier and rougher times lovers
of peace and quiet, to whom neither the camp nor the
field offered anything but discomfort and humiliation. Our
age seems far enough from theirs ; but there are gentler souls
of both sexes to whom neither the fierce competitions of our
modern life, the cares and anxieties of family life, — in one
word, neither marriage, nor business, nor politics, nor society
in its technical and artificial sense, — have any smallest
attraction.

For these the office of a Brother or Sister or Deaconess
would seem to offer a place to serve God and to feed their own
souls J and the fact that religious orders of both sexes are

1 Rev. Dr. Jessup.

Religious Orders. 211

already at work in the Church, with recognized usefulness
and wide and grateful appreciation, and also that the office of
a Deaconess seems now, for the first time since primitive days,
to be finding its living illustrations in other communions as
well as in the Anglican and American branches of the Church,
would seem to indicate that already a question popularly
supposed to be environed with insoluble practical difficulties
had reached a substantial solution.

The sermon which follows was preached in Grace Church,
New York, on Sunday, Dec. 17, 1871. Since then the Dea-
coness Home and Training-school in connection with that
parish have been successfuU}- opened and set in operation
by the Eev. W. E. Huntington, D.D.

XII.

WOMAN'S PLACE AND WORK IN THE
CHURCH.

In speaking of woman's place and work in the Church
it is gratifying to remember that the late General Con-
vention of our Church,^ and especially the House of
Bishops in its Pastoral Letter, have recognized not only
the general expediency but also the Biblical authority
for woman's work, and for the definite place in the or-
ganization of the Church which to-day it is proposed that
woman should officially hold. " In the revival of the
Scriptural diaconate of women," says the bishops' pas-
toral, " we feel an earnest desire that prudence and good
sense may preside over every effort." These words are
alike timely and wise. We have all heard a great deal
within the past few years of the revival of sisterhoods
and other similar associations of women, having in view
a more unreserved devotion on the part of those con-
nected with them to work for Christ, His Church, and
His poor. During the past ten or fifteen years more
than thirty such associations have been organized in our
mother Church of England, and some seven or eight in
our own Church in the United States. Their growth
thus far has not been particularly rapid ; but they have
multiplied fast enough to provoke among us a good deal

1 Of A.D. 1871.

Woman's Place and Work in the Church. 213

of inquiry, and in some quarters, it is not improbable, a
good deal of alarm.

On the one hand, it has been felt and owned that
there was in woman an immense power of usefulness,
which the Church was at best but poorly employing.
The records of Christian work for the past twenty years,
both abroad and among ourselves, have shown us how
much one such woman as Miss Marcli could do in Enff-
land, not merely among her own sex, but among such a
discouraging class of men as the English navvies, or most
inferior day-laborers ; and what more than one other
woman here could do in gathering bodies of a hundred
men or more Sunday after Sunday into Bible classes, and
so rescuing many a clever mechanic not merely from in-
temperance and vice, but also from downright unbelief.
It has been felt, too, that earnest women working thus,
without a recognized place and definite commission,
were working at a disadvantage. It has been felt that
that advantage which belongs to a clergyman in having
a distinctive office, garb, and status, would, if it could be
given to woman, be no less an advantage to her. And
at this point it has been common to turn to the sister of
charity in the Roman Church, and point to the more
obvious advantages which are undoubtedly hers. If we
want a sister of charity, we always know where to find
her. Her home is not in a private dwelling, from which
any one of a host of social or secular engagements may
call her away just when we most need her, but in
an institution ; and in that institution her duties are
such that if in an emergency we need her services

214 Way marks.

promptly, we can promptly and surely command them.
She has no family cares to detain her ; no home duties
which may (and as in the case of all home duties ought
to) claim her first attention ; and when she passes
in and out of the dwellings of poverty or sickness,
she needs no escort, and is safe from all insult. No
most degraded man ever offered, so far as I know, an
intentional rudeness to a sister of charity. She bears a
charmed life, and blessings attend upon her steps.

Why, then, it has been very naturally and persistently
asked, should we too not have sisters of charity ? Shall
we be guilty of the weakness of despising a good instru-
mentality because we find it in bad company ? Fas est
ah hoste doceri. Let us not refuse to learn wisdom even
from our adversaries. If there are earnest and capable
and godly women who are willing to give themselves
to work for Christ and His Church, can we afford to
let this misapplied power run to waste because we are
afraid of being thought to imitate those with whom
we do not agree ? May we not have the agency of
organized women without the evils of that agency, as
we see them at work elsewhere ? May not we, too, have
sisters of charity without imitating the vices of Roman
sisterhoods ?

These questions have already found their most satis-
factory answer, as many among us believe, in those or-
ganizations of sisterhoods in our branch of the Church
on both sides of the Atlantic to which I have already
referred. It would be idle to deny that a great deal of
good work has during the last ten or fifteen years been

Woman's Place and Work in the Church, 215

done by means of deaconesses or sisterhoods among the
poor, the neglected, and the outcast, which otherwise
would never have been done at all ; and it is equally un-
deniable that in the doing of that work many women of
earnest nature and sympathetic spirit and abundant en-
ergy have found a sphere of activity and a definite rule
of life which have been to them at once a help, a privi-
lege, and a blessing.

On the other hand, however, we may not overlook
the fact that the revival and multiplication of religious
orders of women among us has in certain quarters ex-
cited not a little alarm and provoked not a little sus-
picion. Such organizations are exclusively associated
in the minds of many persons with thoughts of an alien
and hostile communion, — a communion which has been
(in this country, at any rate) until lately the only reli-
gious body which has employed them ; and when such
persons have turned to watch the operations of religious
orders of women, it has happened, unfortunately, that
they have seen in them in some instances more eager-
ness to imitate Latin than Scriptural models, and more
ardor to introduce among us practices that are Roman
or mediaeval than primitive and Apostolic. That earnest
minds looking on should be impatient of such unwisdom
we cannot greatly wonder ; nay, more, that they should
condemn those organizations in which such practices,
however covertly, have a place, is not greatly surprising
either. A system will always be judged — in the popular
judgment, at least — as much by its accidents as its
essence. If barnacles gather on a ship's bottom, the

216 Waymarks,

passengers will condemn her sailing qualities quite as
much as if her sluggishness were due to lier model, and
not to the pestiferous insects who have built their cells
upon her keel. The alarm which has been awakened in
some minds is not therefore surprising, even though it
is not altogether intelligent ; and it certainly has not
been diminished by the history of certain sisterhoods in
our mother Church, which have practically asserted their
independence of all ecclesiastical authority, and in some
instances denied the right of inspection to the bishops of
those dioceses in which they were situated. If we cannot
have woman's commissioned help without such serious
evils, it is certainly a grave question whether it is worth
while to have it at all.

But suppose those evils are not inherent in the
system, — is then the question which remains merely one
of expediency ; and in deciding it have we no other lights
than those of the experience of the past and of the
present, about which men may easily and very widely
differ ? If this were the position of this question to-day,
I think I should still be able to show you many reasons
why the Church might wisely and rightly revive such an
agency among ourselves, and why we might well employ
it. But the ground on which the friends of the present
movement for commissioning godly women for work in
Christ's Church, either under the name of " sisters " or
some other, may plant themselves is, we venture to
believe, a much stronger one, and finds its best defence
in the words of Holy Scripture itself. Those words of
the late Pastoral Letter of the House of Bishops which

Woman's Place and Work in the Church. 217

speak of " the revival of the Scriptural Diaconate of
women" are, we may be sure, words which were well
weighed, and discriminatingly and deliberately uttered.
They imply that there is in Holy Scripture unmistak-
able evidence of the official position and work of women
in the Apostolic Church, and that our modern proposal
to set her apart for Christ's service and to give to her a
definite commission and a recognized status is not
merely modern, but in truth the revival of something
which is alike ancient and primitive and Scriptural.
And when we turn to the New Testament itself we find
it so. For example, near the close of that loving and
beautiful letter of Saint Paul's to the Church at Philippi
we read these touching words : " And I entreat thee
also, true yoke-fellow, help those ivomen which have
labored with me in the gospel^ with Clement also, and
with other my fellow-laborers, whose names are in the
book of life." ^ Here women are spoken of as not only
fellow-laborers, but as " fellow-laborers in the gospel,"
and their mention is coupled with that of the name of
one who was eminent in the ministry of Christ. It
would be very hard to believe, even if the New Testament
told us nothing more of work for Christ as done by
Christian women, that these were simply estimable
mothers or daughters of families who gave to the found-
ing of the infant Church at Philippi merely such
snatches of time as they were able to rescue from other
engagements. The very grouping of the verse seems
to point to a class who had a definite place in the great

1 Philippiaus iv. 3.

218 Waymarks,

work of proclaiming Christ to Heathendom, and who
had done their work lovingly and well.

And, when we turn from this same Apostle's letter
to the Philippians to that other which he wrote to the
Christians in Rome, we find, not only such greetings as
these, " Salute Tryphena and Tryphosa, who labor in
the Lord. Salute the beloved Persis, who labored
much in the Lord," ^ but also this special reference to
another fellow-laborer : " I commend to you Phebe, our
sister, which is a servant of the Qhurcli which is at
Cenchrea." ^ Here is certainly one woman who has a
definite official position, for she is spoken of, not
merely in general terms, as " a servant of Christ," but
distinctively as " a servant of the Church." And the
force of that language is certainly not weakened when,
turning from our English version to the Greek we find
that the word which is translated servant is hiaKovov^
the plain rendering of which, according to its connection,
would be deacon or deaconess ; so that the passage, if
properly translated, would read, " I commend to you
Phebe, our sister, who is deaconess of the church in
Cenchrea," — even as we should say to-day, " our brother
John Paul, who is pastor, or assistant, of the church in
such a place."

A still more striking and most conclusive passage,
however, is that which is found in the third chapter of
Saint Paul's first letter to Timothy. In that epistle the
Apostle is giving certain specific directions as to what we
may call the domestic life of the clergy. He enjoins

1 Homans xvi. 12. ^ Romans xvi. 1.

Woman s Place and Work in the Church. 219

that the bishops and elders be vigilant, sober, hospitable,
no brawlers, not covetous, nor quarrelsome; that the
deacons be grave, not double-tongued, not given to much
wine ; and then he turns to declare what, as our version
has it, their wives must be. Now, it has probably struck
many a thoughtful reader that it is somewhat strange, to
say the least, that the Apostle should be thus particular
in declaring what should be the characteristics of the
wives of deacons, when he says nothing as to what ought
to characterize the wives of elders, or presbyters, or
bishops. These latter, as occupying a more conspicuous
position, and as being the companions of those of the
clergy holding higher rank, would certainly seem most
to have needed instruction as to what was required of
them in the marriage relation. And yet, if our version
is to be believed, the Apostle has nothing to say to the
wife of a bishop or a presbyter, and is only very par-
ticular as to what traits a Christian woman should
exhibit when he comes to speak to the wife of a deacon !
Our perplexity disappears entirely, however, when we
come to learn, as a copy of the Greek Testament shows
us, that the Apostle is not speaking of deacon's wives
at all, but of deaconesses, or, to use his own phrase, of
"women-deacons." He had said in a previous verse
" let the deacons " — that is, the men-deacons — " be
grave " and sober, and the like ; and then he proceeds to
add, " Even so must women " of that order, that is,
" women-deacons," or, as we should say " deaconesses,^''
be grave, not slanderers, sober and faithful. Such lan-
guage ^ which gives such unequivocal recognition to a

220 Waymarks,

religious order of women as already existing in the
Church, seems conclusive, and makes us own the force
of the remark lately made by an eminent Biblical
scholar of our mother Church to the effect that " if the
testimony borne in these two passages to a ministry of
women in Apostolic times had not been blotted out of
our English Bibles [by incorrect translations] attention
would probably have been directed to the subject at an
earlier date, and our English Church would not have
remained so long maimed in one of her hands. ^^ ^

And now that we have these passages in a truer guise,
what shall we do in regard to that agency for the em-
ployment of which they give us such clear and sufficient
authority ? Surely there never was a time when the
cause of Christ more urgently needed every available
agency for doing the work which the Master has given
it to do in the world. Surely, too, there are no gifts
which the Church more urgently needs to utilize than
those winning, persuasive, and sympathetic gifts with
which the Creator has supremely endowed woman.
There appeared the other day a letter written by the elo-
quent, if somewhat erratic preacher who speaks from
the platform of what is known as Plymouth Church, in
which this fact is made the ground of an argument for
admitting woman to the pulpit. Its substance was that
no one can at once inculcate and illustrate that spirit of
love which breathes through the New Testament as can
a woman. And while, as it certainly must seem to a
candid criticism, that same New Testament is clearly

1 J. B. Lightfoot, D. D., " A Revision of the New Testament/' p. 114.

Woman's Place and Work in the Church. 221

enough against any usurpation of the office of teaching
in the congregation by woman, it is as clearly a fact that
hers is a delicacy and tenderness of approach, and an
intuitive wisdom of utterance that oftenest fit her most
of all to deal with those whose ignorance, or vice, or
prejudice make them hardest to reach and win.

Of course, as will be quickly urged in many quarters,
it does not require that a woman should take upon her a
ministerial office, nor join a community, nor array
herself in a peculiar and distinctive habit, in order to
work for her Master. And we ought to be ready, not
merely to admit this, but we need to recognize the fur-
ther fact that, not only are there many devout and
earnest women who can do the Master's work standing
alone, and acting outside of any organization, but also
that there are many women who can work in this way
best of all. They can be a law unto themselves, and to
associate them with others would only be to hamper and
embarrass them. 1 recall one such noble woman at
this moment, a lady of utmost refinement and of hon-
orable lineage, whose labors in jails and almshouses in
our great metropolis have made a name long distin-
guished in the annals of our country more illustrious
than ever upon the loftier bede-roll of Christian philan-
thropy. All honor to such workers, and to the work
which they have so faithfully done !

But when we have fully recognized the value of
individual and disassociated services the fact still
remains that we want, for a large class of persons in
the Church, the manifold advantages of a definite

222 Waymarks.

organization and a specific commission. How many
earnest and warm-hearted women are there in our land
who have abundant leisure, who are without domestic
ties, and who are fitted by training and inclination for a
definite post of service in the Master's Kingdom ! As it
is, perhaps they do try to do something, but they are
pulled many ways by many conflicting engagements, and
they have no definite place. If a Christian pastor needs
their help, he cannot easily find them, and if they, as will-
ing disciples of the Divine Friend of Martha and Mary,
wish to minister to Him in the persons of His sick and
poor, they very often are not allowed to do it. A young
girl wishes merely to teach a class in Sunday-school, or
a generous and sympathetic woman wishes to go to the
bedside of some sick sufferer. But very often neither
of them can do as they would without a sneer at their
perhaps inconvenient enthusiasm, or without something
worse than a sneer from the lips of a selfish man, who,
though neither husband nor son, may happen to find
them absent on such an errand when in the interests of
his personal comfort they are " wanted." Surely for
any Christian woman whose heart is warm with a desire
to do something for her Master, and who is bound by no
positive domestic obligations, to be free from such
annoyance and embarrassment in her work would be an
immense boon.

Why should we not give her that boon ? It is pos-
sible for woman to have a definite place whether as
an appointed deaconess or as a recognized sister with-
out incurring either the dangers of monasticism or the

Woman's Place and Work in the Church. 223

perils of enforced vows, and the Church of our affec-
tions is wise in having recognized the importance of
a primitive and Scriptural agency, and in having
resolved to restore it to its original simplicity and use-
fulness, by purging it from mediaeval errors. The narrow
limits of these pages forbid any attempt to portray a
sisterhood or a deaconesses' institution, as one would
fain see them organized and at work among ourselves.
They have undoubtedly — as what earthly agency has
not ? — their dangers ; but may we not venture to believe
that those dangers can largely, if not wholly, be avoided ?
And if they can, and if God has a place, an office,
a definite post and calling in His Church for woman,
may it not be well for those who share the sex of the
Virgin Mother, of the Magdalene, and of Salome to put to
themselves the question, " May not I be called to such a
work as this ? Have not I that freedom from domestic
ties, that love for the Master, and that aptitude for
usefulness in His Church, which, when His cause
languishes in the world for want of helpers, and when
His truth stands still for lack of eager feet to bear it
forth to men, will lead me gladly to exclaim, while
looking up to Him for strength to do His will, ' Lord !
here am I ! send me ' ? '^

CHURCH SCHOOLS IN AMERICA.

That remarkable man who impressed himself in so many
ways upon our American Church life, Dr. William A. Muhl-
enberg, became earliest known to many as the founder of a
Church school at College Point, L. I., — the first of its
kind, at any rate of any marked influence, in this country.

From that school went forth into the Church and into
secular pursuits some of the most eminent and useful men of
the first half of this century. Bishops and other clergy,
lawyers, doctors, and men of affairs were there trained and
moulded by an influence which left enduringly upon them
the mark of a strong, noble, and unique personality.

In the year 1855 the Legislature of New Hampshire passed
an act to incorporate St. Paul's School. If not directly,
yet by no very remote sequence of influences, St. Paul's
School may be said to have had its origin in those influences
set in operation by the earlier school at College Point. A
layman of rare devotion and large foresight, ^ whose services
to the Church of his adoption in Massachusetts can never be
forgotten, found himself moved — partly by the diflicult}^ of
finding just such a school as he desired for his own children,
and no less by his sense of what was demanded for the best
nurture of New England boys — to set apart certain land and
buildings near Concord, N. H., for the purpose of founding
a school to be administered in accordance with the principles
of the Episcopal Church. This first foundation w^as followed
in subsequent years by other generous benefactions from the
same hand; and a school which began with three pupils has

1 Dr. George Cheyne Shattuck.

Church Schools in America, 225

grown to number four hundred, with applications, for many-
years continuously, far beyond its repeatedly enlarged capac-
ity. Its history as a school has been the history, as thus in-
dicated, of exceptional wisdom, courage, and generosity on
the part of its founder, and, it may be added, of singular and
steadfast devotion on the part of those who, whether as trus-
tees or instructors, have had to do with its remarkable growth
and prosperity. But there is no one of these who will not
own that that growth and prosperity have been most of all
due to the remarkable man,i who from the day when, in
April, 1855, he entered upon his duties as its rector, has
been the fans et origo of its best and most gracious life.
Without previous experience of a kind such as would seem to
have been demanded by such an emergency, he showed him-
self from the outset to be possessed of that ''divine gift of
order,'' that natural aptitude for rulership, that rare and
singular power of relating himself directly and intimately
with the most dissimilar and perplexing phases of boyish
character, and of winning an influence over all who came in
contact with him, of which, save in such a case as that of
Dr. Thomas Arnold, there have been in the whole history of
modern school life few, if any, instances.

One may not speak of the living in terms which would not
the less give pain because to the universal judgment they
are so true ; but no one who knows the story of the growth
of that Church in New England of which the first rector of
St. Paul's School will always be regarded as so bright an
an ornament will hesitate to own that that school, in the
persons of its hundreds of graduates scattered not only all
over New England, but all over the land, has been among
the most potent influences in promoting that growth.

The sermon here given was preached on June 5, 1888, on
the occasion of the consecration of the noble chapel for the
school, erected mainly by the gifts of its graduates.

i Eev. Henry A. Coit, D.D., LL.D.
15

XIII.

SERMON.

And it came to pass . . . ere the lamp of God went out in the
temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was, and Sa7nuel
was laid down to sleep ^ that the Lord called Samuel, and
he answered, Here am I. — 1 Samuel iii. 2-4.

" The temple of the Lord " here spoken of was not so
much a temple as a tabernacle ; but though only a tent
in Shiloh, it was the sanctuary of Israel, and the seat of
its ruler or judge. From hence, under the guidance of
Eli, had gone forth the voice of worship and the tones
of law. It was the centre of the rule of the judges ; and
Hebrew history, lost to view after the death of Samson,
reappears with Eli, who " sat within the tabernacle gate
and judged Israel " for wellnigh forty years.

But the days of his rule were about to end ; a turning-
point in the nation's life had come at length ; and that
inevitable law by which

" The old order changeth ever,
Giving place to new,"

was to find in the history of the chosen people a sudden
and tragic fulfilment. The hand of Eli had grown
weak ; his grasp of the sceptre was at once feeble and
ineffectual ; and even within the sacred precincts of the
sanctuary, and in the persons of his own sons, crime and

Church Schools in America. 227

lawlessness ran riot unrebuked. "Hophni and Pliinehas,
the sons of Eli, are, for students of ecclesiastical history,
characters," which have been fitly described as " ' of
great and instructive wickedness.' They are the true
exemplars of the grasping and worldly clergy of all ages.
It was the sacrificial feasts that gave occasion for their
rapacity. It was the dances and assemblies of women
in the vineyards and before the sacred tent that gave oc-
casion for their debaucheries. . . . But the coarseness
of their vices does not make the moral less pointed for
all times. The three-pronged [instead of the single-
pronged] fork which fishes up the seething flesh is the
earliest type of grasping at pluralities and church-pre-
ferments by base means ; the profligacy at the open door
of the temple is the type of many a scandal brought on
the Christian Church by the selfishness or sensuality of
its ministers." ^ No wonder that the wrath of God
could not long endure them, and that Providential
judgments, swift and sharp, brought an administration
at once so weak and so corrupt to an end.

But from our modern standpoint it is scarcely less a
wonder that it was not superseded by a rule at once of
alien origin and of hostile spirit. When the student of
history reads of ecclesiastical corruption, or of power,
whether secular or spiritual, as abused in ecclesiastical
hands, it is the fashion to find in the incident an argu-
ment for disowning all ecclesiastical authority, and for
distrusting all ecclesiastical power. The government of
Eli and of Eli's time, men say, so far as it was a govern-

J History of the Jewish Churcli, Stanley, part 1, p. 418.

228 Waymarks.

ment, was a " government of the Church ; and Eli, so
far as he was the product of any institution, was the
product of the Church. Well, if you Churchmen want
him as an illustration of the fruits of your system, you
are welcome to him. He was not perhaps a wicked old
man, but he was a very weak one ; and he is a fair type
of that system which trains a man in rites and cere-
monies, in creeds and formularies, but leaves him with
a blunted moral sense, a contracted intellect, and a sel-
fish heart. Plainly enough, whatever else his history
teaches us, it teaches us that whenever a nation wishes
to rear men and not tools, leaders and not formalists, it
must rear them elsewhere than within the precincts of
the Church. Plainly enough, wherever else we are to
look for prophets and reformers in a corrupt and law-
less age, we are not to look for them in the chambers of
the sanctuary."

And yet God does not seem to have thought so. In
that crisis of Israel's history — when the power of the
judge broke down and self-will ran riot in the land,
when corruption nestled at the altar and stalked abroad
in priestly office and apparel — a child's voice is heard
out of the darkness, out of the despair, out of the shame,
savino;, " Lord, here am I.'' We turn to look for its
source, and not out of the wilderness, the hermit's cave,
or the far-country, but right there in the temple it is
heard ; and the child Samuel, dedicated in the temple,
reared in the temple, dwelling in the temple, is the
speaker. Nay, the child Samuel it is, the youth Samuel,
the man Samuel, who, reared and nurtured thus, comes

Church Schools in America. 229

forth from out his chamber in the sanctuary, where the
voice of God has found and spoken to him, and lifts
the Israel of his time out of its sin and shame into
the peace and order of a reverent, loyal, law-abiding
people. If ever there was a reformer, Samuel was a
reformer ; if ever there was a fearless ruler, a righteous
law-giver, a stainless man, Samuel was that man. In all
Hebrew literature, ay, or in any other literature, find if
you can anything finer in its way than that calm challenge
with which, at the last, he lays down the sceptre of his
authority, — " Behold, here I am, old and gray-headed ;
and I have walked before you from my childhood unto
tliis day. Witness against me before the Lord, and be-
fore His anointed : whom have I defrauded ? whom
have I oppressed ? or of whose hand have I received any
bribe to blind mine eyes therewith ? " ^ And such a
ruler, such a judge, such a prophet, was the product
only, solely, absolutely, of the temple. In the temple he
had learned to hearken and to wait ; in the temple. he
had been taught to trust and to obey ; and when at
length in the temple the voice of God finds him and
speaks to him, it is a priest of the temple who recognizes
its august tones, and interprets them to his childish
soul.

The lesson is, I venture to think, not inappropriate
to this place and this occasion. Both the place and
the occasion are unique. It is the occasion of a dedi-
cation or consecration, and the consecration of the
chapel of an institution of learning. Now, in neither

1 1 Samuel xii. 2, 3.

230 Way marks.

of these two things, taken by themselves, is there any-
thing at all remarkable. There are schools and col-
leges all over the land, and there are, I presmne,
chapels connected with most of them ; but in the case
of no one of them all, I venture to affirm, is there an
instance in which the chapel is so plainly and obviously
the one conspicuous figure, the costliest fabric, the dom-
inant centre of the whole. There are, I rejoice to know,
not a few centres of Christian nurture where Christian
teaching is the rule, and where Christian worship is not
unfitly housed ; but it has been reserved for this school,
and for the grateful generosity of those who were once
its pupils, to rear a sanctuary here which among build-
ings of its kind is — at any rate, in our own land —
foremost, if not pre-eminent.

It is this fact, I say, which makes this occasion unique.
The munificence of individual or associated generosity to
our American institutions of learning is in no wise
unusual, nor is its expression very diverse. We have
wealth rearing very splendid dormitories, and very
stately dining-halls, and very complete and amply
equipped laboratories. Just now, I believe that wealth
is chiefly devoting itself, in most of our schools and
colleges, in fit submission to the ruling voice of the hour,
to the erection of gymnasia and swimming-baths ; and
I am told that the provisions in this latter regard of
some of our great universities are likely, before long, to
rival those of Roman magnificence in days when Dio-
cletian reared those splendid structures whose ruins still
survive. In this view, it must be owned, I think, that

Church Schools in America, 231

the visible structures which distinguish our institutions
of learning have a profound significance. They re-
veal the nature of that faith which has reared them.
If a man believes that character is to be formed by
merely physical and intellectual culture ; that the train-
ing of the hand, or the eye, or the brain is to make an
honest man, a loyal citizen, a lover of humanity, — he
will be apt to provide buildings meet for such training,
and no more. If he does not believe that in the nurture
of youth the most august fact is God, and that the most
solemn word is duty, he will not greatly care whether a
boy is taught to recognize the one or to own the other.
And this is, in truth, what we largely see. There could
be no more impressive contrast between the earlier days
of our republic in this regard than the present. No
American can find himself within the boundaries of this
commonwealth, I fancy, without recalling the figure of
that greatest of orators, if not of statesmen, whose
nativity within its borders lends to New Hampshire a
chief distinction. Daniel Webster had, doubtless, not
only great gifts, but great faults. And yet no one can
read the story of his life without seeing how profoundly
it is stamped, from its beginning to its end, with the im-
press of a strong, definite, and devout Christian nurture.
Said Mr. Bell, of his native State, to Webster on the
morning when the latter made his great reply to Hayne,
"It is a critical moment; and it is high time that
the people of this country should know what the Ameri-
can Constitution is." Said Webster in reply, "Then,
by the blessing of Heaven, they shall learn, tliis day,

232 Waymarks.

before the sun goes down, what I understand it to be." ^
" By the blessing of Heaven." The words were not
lightly spoken. They were the language of a man
whose childhood had taught him dependence on God,
and whose manhood never forgot it. Do not mistake
my meaning. I am no stickler for cant phrases or for
empty formalisms. But I think you will agree with me
that in our modern statesmanship there is a barrenness
of reverence for the Unseen, a visible impatience often
of all recognition of those mightiest forces that govern
the universe, that bodes no good for our future. Is it
hard to discern its source ? I make every allowance for
the growth of a triumphant materialism, for the incur-
sion of alien faiths and manners, for the debilitating
effects of wealth and luxury. But behind these there is
another cause, more potent, as I am persuaded, than all
the rest. It is a nurture which, in the schoolroom and
in the college, largely leaves God out of the account,
which trains body and brain alone, and which, as it has
come to be doubtful whether there is anything more or
higher to be trained, has no warning for the conscience,
no discipline for the affections, and, above all, no word
of inspiration for the soul.

And so I think we may well bless God for this day,
for this school, and most of all for this chapel. In
his admirable volume on the '' Rise and Constitution
of Universities," a work which I would commend to the
thoughtful attention of every scholar. Professor Laurie,
of Edinburgh, discusses the influence of Christianity on

1 Lodge's Daniel Webster, pp. 178, 179.

Church Schools in Ainerica. 233

education, and the rise of Christian schools. Contrast-
ing them with those which had preceded them, he
observes : —

'^Had Christianity assumed a purely negative attitude to
the Romano-Hellenic life and culture, and done no more, it
would have to be classed among the destructive powers of
barbarism. But it had its positive side; it had in it a
power to build up as well as to throw down. It introduced
more than one new idea into the life of our race. It broad-
ened and deepened the sentiment of the common brotherhood
of man, by giving to human sj^mpathy and love a divine
sanction. But, most important of all, it fortified the sense
of personality. The individual was now not only a free,
thinking spirit, which had its personal life and personal
rights; this spirit, the true person of each individual, was
now seen to be rooted in God, to be of infinite importance
even in His eyes. Thus, by one stroke as it were, the per-
sonality of each man was deepened, naj^, consecrated, while
at the same time his bond of sympathy with all other human
beings was strengthened. Two opposite results were thus
attained, and these two were conciliated. For the deepening
of man's spiritual, personal life meant the life with God,
and it was in and through this life that his personality be-
came a matter of infinite worth. But this rooting of the
finite subject in the eternal and universal Reason, while
giving infinite worth to the soul of each man, at the same
time made impossible that insolence of individualism and
self-assertipn which had characterized the subjective move-
ment among the Greeks. Man became, as a personality,
much greater than the most exalted Stoic could have con-
ceived; but by the very same act he was taught humility,
dependence, humanity, love."^

1 Laurie, Rise and Coustitution of Universities, pp. 22, 23.

234 Waymarks.

" Humility, dependence, humanity, love." My breth-
ren, these are the things that have been pre-eminently
taught here. The record of this school is not devoid of
honors won by its sons on many fields of endeavor and
in many halls of learning. The standard of its scholar-
ship, as illustrated in the standing of its pupils, is such
as any mother might point to with just pride. But its
pre-eminent distinction has been that it has taught its
children faith, and reverence, and the eternal sanctity of
duty. And these things it has taught, not alone in the
class-room, by text-book, through the impressive lessons
of history, but most of all in St. Paul's chapel. The
daily prayers, the weekly sacraments, the well remem-
bered sermons, the Sunday afternoon Bible lessons, —
these have been powers that have taught Christ's pres-
ence in His Church and Christ's message to His children
in a language never to be forgotten. Once and again
and again — I know it from testimonies which might
well be brought here to help to hallow by their inspiring
memories this holy and beautiful house — has some
young life, struggling in the meshes of strong temptation,
torn by doubt, or smitten by a sense of its sin, heard
from yonder altar or yonder pulpit words of hope and
pardon, a message of life-giving love and courage. Once
and again and again, have young feet, turning thither
tardily and reluctantly, found themselves, like Jacob at
Peniel, halted on their earthly way, and called to climb
the gleaming ladder ascending to the skies. Ah ! my
young brothers, alumni of this school, am I not telling
the story of some of you as I speak these words ? As

Church Schools in America. 235

you come back here to-day, to join with us in giving this
sanctuary, your gift, to God, do not your hearts turn to
the dear old chapel — the hallowed place which those
who have come after you have found " too strait " — with
tender and inextinguishable devotion ? The convictions
that are deepest in your lives to-day, the faith that when
the world scoffs yet lives and glows within you, the rev-
erence for goodness, the love of nobleness, — tell me, are
not these things linked in your memories with lessons that
you learned here, lessons* which you will never forget ?

Believe me, I am not unmindful, in saying this, that
the personal element in all the religious life of this
school has been a pre-eminent element, and that to that,
under God, the influence of its chapel and its chapel
services, its whole system of churchly teaching, have
been largely due. John Henry Newman, in his essay
on " Private Judgment," calls attention, with character-
istic acuteness, to the limitations of such a judgment.
He says : —

'*It is much easier to form a correct and rapid judgment
of persons than of books or of doctrines. Every one. even
a child, has an impression about new faces ; few persons have
any real view about new propositions. There is something
in the sight of persons . . . which speaks to us for approval
or disapprobation with a distinctness to which pen and ink
are unequal. . . . Reason is slow and abstract, cold and
speculative; but man is a being of feeling and action; he
is not resolvable into a dictum de omni et nulla, or a series of
hypotheticals, or a critical diatribe, or an algebraical equa-
tion. And this obvious fact does, as far as it goes, make it
probable that if we are providentially obliged to exercise our

236 Waymarks.

private judgment, the point towards which we have to direct
it is the teacher rather than the doctrine." ^

In the case of a boy, Newman might safely have
written for " probable " the word " inevitable." It is_
tlie teacher, rather than the thing taught, which is the
foremost potentiality in influencing any boy ; and I may
not be denied even by the restraints of this place the
expression of our feeling of grateful homage and affec-
tion for the character and services of one to whom,
under God, the work and influence of this school are
pre-eminently due. His honored associates in this work,
his boys, now men by hundreds, bearing, many of them,
the burden and heat of the day in many a place of honor
and usefulness in Church and State, will never be able
to separate, in their thought and memory, St. Paul's
school and St. Paul's chapel from the rare and com-
manding personality of him who is so absolutely identi-
fied with both of them.

But yet the fact remains — is it not the very office of
this service and of this building to remind us of it ? —
that, in the realm of the highest things, the personality
that moves and influences others is the personality that
itself has been wrought upon by a Force from without
and above. Mr. Matthew Arnold was right, only in a
sense infinitely higher, I fear, than he himself recognized,
when he said the other day, that what our American
society waits for is to be born avcoOev, from above. It
is the teacher and the teaching that know the spell of
that quickening that shall move society and the world !

1 Essays Critical aud Historical, vol. ii. p. 353. London, 1871.

Church Schools in America. 237

But where, save here, my brothers, can they learn it ?
The problems of the teacher in our generation are
certainly not easier than the old. On the contrary,
I think it must be owned that there is much in the
intellectual atmosphere of our time to make them
harder. Never was there an age more impatient of
what it calls the lumber of useless learning. Says the
hard, dry, material spirit of the hour : " I want my boy
taught how to use his hands and brain in such tasks
as will win the most prizes and earn the most money.
Is this education of yours a convertible article, which
may be turned readily into dollars and cents ? For if
not, I want none of it I Greek, Latin, Scripture studies,
the history of the past — what have these to do with the
ores of Mexico and the exports of Singapore ? " And
this spirit, which makes itself felt in many ways, cares
little for conduct and less for character. It offers a
direct premium to any teacher who will content himself
with veneering his pupil with a thin coating of accom-
plishments, or drilling his brain in the use of mechanical
formulce. Surely, I do not need to tell those who hear
me this morning that this is not the way in which men
are made, — men who are to rule themselves, their own
passions, their own powers, and so to rule the world.
To influence a man, to influence a boy, you must not
merely know him or deal with him from without, but
from within. Says Edward Thring: ^

"A grand cathedral is a glorious specimen of thought in
stone ; but to many it is but stone, with no message of the
1 The Theory and Practice of Teaching, pp. 37-40.

238 Waymarks.

higher life, of which, nevertheless, it is a most true and liv-
ing expression. . . . When a traveller in the distance, com-
ing to see it, crosses the last hill, ten miles off, the massive
walls and towers . . . mark it as a building intended for
worship. Many are satisfied at this point. . . . Some go
nearer . . . but the landscape, not the cathedral, is still
the main consideration. ... In the precincts all the out-
side can be seen. . . . But the great purj^ose does not reveal
itself till the reader of mind addresses himself to the inner
truth, and lovingly . . . searches out the history, learns the
plan, strives to enter into the secret shrine of the feelings
which wrought out the . . . sanctuary, and to translate out
of the stone the speech which in very truth is in it. [But]
then, as he gazes, spirit answers spirit. . . . The dumb walls
speak, the beam unlocks its secret ... to a spirit that can
watch and wait and learn. . . .

*'Such is the power of getting near, the power of the
right point of view, when distance is got rid of and mind
touches mind. . . . [And] whenever life is in question,
and the higher manifestations of life, this power of get-
ting closer and closer, of being admitted inside, as it were,
and penetrating to the innermost sanctuary and most secret
work of the organism, whatever it may be, building, paint-
ing, music, book, man, ... is the only means by which
mind can be reached and true success attained. This is
simply the teacher's starting-point.''

Yes, but again I ask, Where but here can such a
power be attained ? Spiritual touch, spiritual insight
— these are none other than the gifts of the Holy
Ghost, and these are the gifts with which Augustine,
and Arnold, and Muhlenberg, nay, with which He
who is the Master of every true teacher, living or
dead, and who " knew what was in man," wrought

Church Schools in America. 239

within that divinest sanctuary, which was made to be
the Temple of the Holy Ghost, and which is the human
heart. And so to-day we come here to dedicate this
holy house as the centre and source of all those gracious
and regenerating influences which have made this
school a power in the land, and which have made its
administration most of all memorable, as illustrating a
Christian nurture, itself in touch with Christ, and rich in
the fruits of the Spirit. The boys, the men, of the
future^ believe me, fathers and brethren — our hope for
them, nay, our hope for the Church, our hope for our
land, must find its reason here ! Other Samuels, yet to
rule in Israel, must come within these walls, and hear
God call, and answer, " Here am I ! " Or else, what-
ever triumphs may be won, the end will be but failure,
and all gain but loss.

And so I congratulate you, my right reverend father,
and you, gentlemen of the trustees of this school, and you,
my reverend brother, who have been from its foundation
its rector, upon the hopes long cherished which find
fulfilment here to-day. This is the fitting crown upon a
life-work memorable for results which glowing and grate-
ful hearts all over this land will never cease to cherish.
I may not speak of them as I would, for I know well
the pain that even this brief allusion may cause to one
to whom all personal praise is at once pain and punish-
ment, but I shall not be denied the privilege of mingling
my joy with yours who have come up here to-day, upon
this fair and finished work. The venerable donor of
the material foundation of this school comes back here

240 Waymarks.

to-day, " his eye not dim nor liis natural force abated,"
to own that when he made the first gift — wise, large-
hearted, and far-seeing — from which this school has
grown, " he builded better than he knew," and loving
hearts in both hemispheres, St. Paul's boys, w^ho under
many skies, in ranch and pulpit, at desk or on quarter-
deck, are bearing the honor of Alma Mater as a white
guerdon on their hearts, are lifting their prayers with
ours as they pray, " For my brethren and companions'
sake I will wish thee prosperity : peace be within thy
walls and plenteousness within thy palaces ! " May
God be pleased to hear that prayer, and grant to it
abundant answer. Aiid when our work is done, and
tired hands and feet are crossed in rest, may children
and children's children still come here to learn to
serve God in His Holy Church, and to give thanks for
all the love that here has led and fed and taught
them !

AMERICAN CHURCHES IN EUROPE.

It is a common accusation against republics that they fail
to inspire the spirit of loyalty; and defenders of monarchical
institutions are fond of insisting that there can be no patriot-
ism without devotion to a person.

The history of elder republics would be a sufficient answer
to that charge, if it found no refutation in republics that are
more modern. But if there were no other evidence of a
strong national feeling in Americans, a very interesting
proof of it might be found in the inauguration in the leading
capitals of Europe of religious services in which the ministra-
tions are conducted by clergj^men who are citizens of the
United States, according to the only liturgy in the English
language habitually in use in that republic, and in which a
conspicuous feature is always the prayers for rulers of the
republic, and for its Senate and Representatives in Congress
assembled.

When these services were originally and somewhat ten-
tatively initiated it was objected that they were not only un-
necessary but confusing. In every one of the cities in which
they were begun, there were already services in the -English
language, conducted by clergy of the Church of England,
whose liturgy and usages were substantially identical with
those of American Churchmen. It was urged, not without
force, that in countries where a corrupted form of Christianity
prevailed it was much to be desired that those who disowned
its authority should i)resent, as far as possible, a united
front; and it was further felt that it was an ungracious re-
turn for the nursing care which the Church of England had

16

242 Wat/marks.

vouchsafed to its American daughter in that daughter's
earlier and less prosperous childhood, that the child should
show itself unwilling to worship at its mother's knee.

But there were other influences which proved too strong to
be restrained by considerations such as these ; and a foremost
one among them was undoubtedly that ardent national feel-
ing which, as American travellers illustrate it in so many
and such unexpected ways, is to foreigners a matter of con-
stant and profound surprise.

It is this feeling which largely explains the existence in
Eome, Paris, Dresden, and Nice of costly and beautiful
church edifices erected solely by the gifts of Americans, and
which also explains the maintenance of services under Ameri-
can auspices in Florence, Berlin, Geneva, and other European
centres. Two of the churches thus erected would be memo-
rable structures anywhere; and the sermons which follow
were preached the one in connection with the consecration
of St. Paul's American Church in Eome, on March 29, 1876,
and the other on the occasion of the consecration of the
Church of the Holy Trinity, Paris, on Thanksgiving Day,
November, 1886. The former of these edifices owes its erec-
tion largely to the well-directed energy, rare artistic taste,
and unwearied perseverance of the Kev. Dr. Robert J. Nevin,
who, having served his country with distinction during her
Civil War, entered the ministry, and became rector of St.
Paul's Church, Eome, in 1869.

The Church of the Holy Trinity, Paris, a structure of equal
taste and dignity, erected at a cost of five hundred thousand
dollars, and maintaining throughout the year a service of
great beauty and dignit}^, is no less indebted to the Eev. Dr.
John B. Morgan, who became its rector in a. d. 1872.

XIV.

THE WITNESS OF SAINT PAUL IN ROME.

And the night following the Lord stood by him, and said,
Be of good cheer, Paul ; for as thou hast testified of me
in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Home. —
Acts xxiii. 11.

These are somewhat discouraging words with which to
raise a man's despondent spirits. As you will remem-
ber, they follow that fearless and impassioned argument
which the Apostle had made in behalf of his message
and his Master, and made, as it seemed for the moment,
in vain. Standing there in Jerusalem on the castle
stairs, he had told his own story, and with it had de-
clared the nature of his Lord's commission ; and no
sooner had he proclaimed that that commission called
him to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles than men who
till that moment had listened to him with absorbed at-
tention, spurned him from their presence, declaring that
it was not fit that he should live.

We know the rest, — how, when he is summoned from
this arraignment before the mob to appear at the bar of
the Sanhedrim, he opens his lips before what ought to
have been that cooler and more impartial tribunal to

244 Way marks.

have them closed with an insult and a blow ; we know
how, by one chance word of his, his examination before
the council is converted into a fight so fierce between its
two opposing parties that '' the chief captain, fearing
lest the Apostle should be torn in pieces of them,"
snatches him away from Pharisees and Sadducees alike,
and locks him in a dungeon in the castle. Have we
ever thought of his reflections there ? Ah, how hard
he had tried to bring his countrymen to understand
him ! With what consummate w^isdom, with what ex-
haustless patience, with what rare and singular blending
of winning candor and delicate reserve had he spoken
his message ! Well, as he thought it all over, — as his
thin and restless fingers absently pressed the lips still
bruised and bleeding, it may be, with the blow which no
brutal foreigner, but an Israelitish hand had dealt him,
— how do you think he estimated the situation ? Did
this look much like success ? Were these the victories
which the Gospel was to achieve ? Was he never to
open his mouth for that Master whom he loved with
such ardent and passionate devotion without rousing the
fires of human resentment and kindling anew the dying
embers of a sectarian animosity ? It is easy to say that
the Apostle had counted the cost beforehand, and under-
stood that his preaching would provoke official opposition
and personal insult. I presume he had ; but I imagine
that he had some human sensibilities to be wounded and
cast down ; and I venture to think that we do not under-
stand him any better, but rather worse, by lifting him
in our ordinary conceptions of him to a pedestal where

The Witness of Saint Paul in Rome. 246

no disheartening experiences could touch or depress
him ; and so I think that just at this point he may easily
have been profoundly disheartened. What now was there
in the message that came to him when that night the
Lord stood by him to cheer and reassure him ? " Be of
good cheer, Paul ; for as thou hast testified of Me in
Jerusalem so must thou bear witness also in Rome."

The words present the two imperial cities in sugges-
tive contrast. It is the sixtieth year of the Christian
era. Israel is a province of Rome, and Jerusalem is a
conquered capital. Here and there the message of the
Cross has won a handful of disciples, but on the whole
Judaism is as haughty, as scornful, as unrelenting in its
animosity to the truth of Christ as when it nailed the
Saviour to the cross. Nay, the loss of their civil power
seems only to have made the Israelitish priesthood more
resolute and more tenacious in the maintenance of their
national faith. If they drew their sacerdotal cordon
round a more contracted circle of sovereignty, they
maintained those religious peculiarities which that
cordon inclosed with a pertinacity all the more inflexible.
There is nothing grander in apostolic history than those
two defences of the Apostle's which immediately precede
the text. And yet how impotent they seemed to have
been ! The man has spoken with his whole heart in his
message, and with his whole soul, eager, nay, on fire
with his lofty purpose, looking out of his eyes. And the
end of it is the wild clamor of a mob; and, a little
later, the infuriated dissensions of rival sects. It is at
such a moment that he is bidden to be of good cheer —

246 Waymarks.

of good cheer, as lie lies there in a felon's cell, bound
and smitten because, as he had testified of Christ at
Jerusalem, so must he bear witness of Him at Rome.
Verily, as I began by saying, these are somewhat
strange words with which to raise a man's despondent
spirits.

For, if we know what Jerusalem was in the year of
our Lord 60, we know equally well what Rome was. It
was midway in the reign of Nero. Stained as were both
emperor and court with crime, there was as yet no
decadence of Rome's imperial power. The riches that
she had snatched from the coffers of conquered nations
still glittered in her palaces, and went to enrich her
senators and captains. There had been great cruelty in
her conquests, but there was still splendid organization
in her armies, and not yet wholly decayed or impotent
were those great ideas of law, as regulating private license
and dominating individual caprice, which had done so
much to lift her into her place as mistress of the world.
It is true that her people were more tolerant of religious
diversities than the Jew, but it was the toleration of
contempt, or, at least, the liberality of indifferentism.
In the Pantheon were the deities of every land and the
shrines of every faith, and if he could care to, the Apostle
knew that he would be permitted to rear there an altar
even to the despised Nazarene. But none knew better
than this trained Hebrew scholar — pupil sometime at
the feet of Gamaliel — that the teacher who should hint
that the deities of the Pantheon were all alike to yield
to the incomparable sovereignty of the Man Christ

The Witness of Saint Paul in Rome. 2-xl

Jesus, would be hooted for his presumption, if he were
not laughed at for his infatuation.

And yet this very task it is that is presented to him
to cheer him amid the discouragements of that other
task with which here we find him confronted.

Whatever may seem to have been the strangeness of
such a message, we know well that it did not fail of its
effect. The greater, harder task that opened before the
Apostle, instead of daunting, seems only to have inspired
him. He may have been disheartened as he lay down to
sleep Avithin the castle-walls, but though he woke next
morning to learn of a conspiracy whose successful ac-
complishment would have brought to him a speedy rest
from his labors, yet with characteristic energy he de-
feats the plot and makes ready for his journey to Rome.
And why ? Ah ! why, but because, as he reminds him-
self, even as in that midnight vision his Master Himself
had reminded him, he is not doing his own work, but
God's work ; not sent to bear witness of Paul, but to
teach and to preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
What mattered it what became of himself, or of his
Words or labors or whole ministrv ? He was not in-
augurating a new school of Pauline philosophy, or gath-
ering a new sect of Pauline disciples. He might preach
to unwilling ears in Rome even as he had in Jerusalem ;
and his Master's message, instead of winning assent,
might continue to provoke resentment. But his calling
was simply to bear witness, and He whose message he
proclaimed would take care of His own truth and win
for it acceptance in His own time and way. Did He bid

248 Waymarks.

him bear that message to still unfriendlier shores and to
testify of the Cross to still more alienated peoples ?
That call was an inspiration, no matter how hopeless
the outlook. If God had other work for him to do,
his it was to do it with a trustful and undaunted heart.
The words recalled him from himself and his discour-
agements to his Master and His message. They re-
minded him whose messenger he was, and with whose
truths he was intrusted.

And that consciousness, alike profound and indwelling,
was at once the spell of his power and the secret of his
success. Need I remind you how in a few short years
the whole face of things was changed, alike in that
capital which he was now leaving, and in that other and
mightier capital to which he was sent ? Need I remind
you how in a little while there came to be saints even in
"■Caesar's household" — tliat Caesar whose vices were
even then so rank as to scandalize the mobs whom he
diverted ? Need I tarry to show you how, next to the
mighty power of the ministry of the Master Himself,
there is no single influence so wide-reaching, so potential,
so marvellously transforming, as the influence of Paul
the Apostle in all the history of primitive Cliristianity ?
As a few years later they led the aged Israelite without
the walls along that Ostian highway whose earth, who,
here this morning, has not trod with a tenderer reverence
because of the martyr's memory ? his Roman executioners
thought they were putting an end to a troublesome
enthusiast and to a contemptible and insignificant sect.
And yet, already had the Apostle's witness to his Lord

The Witness of Saint Paul in Rome. 249

struck deep such roots as shook, ere long, the very foun-
dations of the empire itself. In less than three centuries
Rome was ruled by a Christian sovereign, and the ban-
ners of the empire, whether they waved in Jerusalem or
in Rome, were blazoned with the image of the cross. In
the spirit in which he, this great Apostle to the Gentiles,
had labored, other men caught up the standard which
fell from his dying hand and bore it forward to still
wider and larger conquests. Read the story of the men,
ay, and of the women, who fell in yonder amphitheatre,
and see how this one's solitary idea of their high calling
as WITNESSES for Christ conquered their fears and
steadied their courage to the bitter end ! And this, this
it was that men could not misunderstand nor ignore.
Who was this Galilean Divinity who could inspire such
discipleship and draw to His despised standard such
saintly heroism ? And so it came to pass that, step by
step, indifference gave way to curiosity, and curiosity to
interest, and interest to personal faith and absolute
devotion. Men lost their personality in Christ, and by
the indwelling power of that divine life which made the
Apostle himself forever to say, " Not I, but Christ which
dwelleth in me," they bore such witness to their Lord as
won the world, wherever they went, to bow at their
Master's feet.

Happy would it be if we who sit here this morning
had, as we turn over the pages of Christian history,
nothing else to remember ! But Jerusalem and Rome
still stand to invite the feet of the pilgrim, and to
challenge the inquisitiveness of the student of history.

250 Way marks.

And what can we say of the witness which they bear
to-day to Him to whose name the great Apostle once so
fearlessly bore testimony within their walls ? How
have they cherished and preserved that truth which
Paul once preached to them, and which in other days
found at length such wide and eager welcome ? Alas !
the contrast with which they greet us to-day is as pain-
ful as it is instructive. It is but a few weeks since it
was my fortune to find myself for the first time in
Jerusalem, and to thread with reverent curiosity its
ancient streets. There are others, I doubt not, here,
who have made the same pilgrimage, and looked upon
the same scenes. If so, let me ask you if there is any
sadder spectacle than that ancient city, once the home
of the Master and His disciples, hallowed as the scene of
His mighty works and of His mightier death, given up
to-day to the religion of the Moslem and the dominion
of the Turk ? Yes, there is a sadder sight there even
than this ; and it is the sight of those contending
Christian sects whom a sneering Mohammedanism holds
back ofttimes, with force of arms, from tearing each
other in pieces, and whose shameless rivalries and
dissensions profane alike the birthplace and the
sepulchre of their common Lord. Where, we ask in
shamefacedness and despair, as we wend our way
among those scenes which supremely the Master has
hallowed by His presence, are the evidences of that
earlier devotion which counted all as lost for Christ, and
had no other aspiration than to bear its daily witness to
His honor? Alas, we know now how, long ago, that

The Witness of Saint Paul in Rome. 251

simpler and single devotion died out of the church of
Jerusalem even as it did in so many others of the
churches of the East. We know now how selfish
ambitions and a passion for personal aggrandizement
usurped, in the hearts of prelates and priests and people,
that other and heaven-born passion for the glory of
Christ and his gospel which burned in the heart of
Paul. We know now how, when in the seventh century
Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, surrendered
the holy city to the Moslem Caliph, he found only an
old man seated on the ground eating dried dates and
drinking only water, — a man having but one single
ambition, and that to win converts to the faith of
Mohammed ; and we know, too, how then too late he
realized that Mohammedanism had conquered Chris-
tianity by snatching from it its own weapons of supreme
devotion to a leader, and of self-forgetful "sacrifices for
his sake. From that day to this, as we all know, amid
whatever varying fortunes, the aspect of Jerusalem has
not greatly changed. Christ is still a stranger to the
vast majority of its people, and His name at best a jest
or a byword upon their lips.^

And if it is thus to-day in Jerusalem, how is it to-day
in Rome ? God forbid that I should use this place or
these moments to call hard names or to bring any rail-
ing accusation against those of whatever faith who
profess and call themselves Christians. But where
shall we look in this Rome of to-day for that earlier and
loftier devotion which, among the converts of Paul

1 See Irving's " Mahomet aud his Successors," chap, xviii.

252 Waymarks.

the Apostle, burned and glowed at the name of Christ ?
Where shall we look for that single and supreme love
for Him which would allow no other, above all no mere
creature alone, to usurp that honor which belongs to
Him ? Where shall we look for a priesthood and a
people with no thought of mere ecclesiastical aggran-
dizement, and no impulse but of love for the souls of
men ? Where shall we look for the daily manifestation
of that one supreme truth, which, as it was central to
the preaching of the Apostle, must needs be central to
every living church, — the truth that the aim of a
Christian life is not any selfish achievement, but simply
to bear its clear and steadfast witness to that Lord who
hath bought it with His blood ?

If we fear lest we might look in vain for such a
manifestation elsewhere in this ancient capital, let us
see to it that we do not look in vain for it here. We
who have reared this holy house to God's honor, and
consecrated it under the name of His latest called but
noblest Apostle, let us not forget that its presence in
these streets is an impertinence, and its costliest adorn-
ments an empty mockery, unless here there is mani-
fested a single and supreme desire to bear a ceaseless
testimony to the name and work of Christ. For this,
and for this only, if I understand their aims, have
Americans reared this temple and given it to their
Lord. Not to gratify any merely national pride, not
to achieve any merely sectarian triumph, not to secure
a safe retreat from within which to hurl either taunt or
defiance at Christians of other whatsoever name, but

The Witness of Saint Paul in Rome. 253

simply here to witness for their Lord, have they who
have toiled and they who have given up builded these
hallowed walls. And one who is but a stranger here
may at least venture to offer the prayer that no other
less worthy aspiration may ever find a place within
them !

This is St. Paul's Church. May the spirit of Paul be
evident in every act performed, and heard in every word
that shall be spoken here ; may no acrimoniousness
of partisan clamor ever find utterance here ; may no
narrowness of vision nor selfishness of aim shut out
from the siglit of priest or of people here the one .soli-
tary figure of a crucified and risen Christ ; and may the
services which shall be said in this place, and every
sermon which shall be preached here, witness to the
infinite love and compassion of that Christ in a language
which cannot be mistaken, — a language of yearning
tenderness, and yet of unsparing truthfulness, — a
language of courageous directness, and yet of ceaseless
wisdom !

Surely it is a happy augury that this church is to bear
the name of the " Apostle to the Gentiles ; " for who
among the noble army of evangelists and martyrs who
laid the first foundations of Christ's Church has illus-
trated an energy so untiring, a purpose so undaunted,
and, above all, a wisdom so profound ? I think of him
standing upon Mars Hill amid the rival divinities of
classic Greece, and there, instead of scoffing at the idola-
try which greeted him, recognizing with Christ-like ten-
derness and with a singular and high-bred courtesy the

254 Way marks.

groping aspirations which even there were feeling after
God, if haplj they might find Him. Something of such
a spirit, something of such dehcate discrimination, such
large-hearted sympathy, one may surely venture to pray
for in behalf of him who shall stand in this place and
minister at yonder altar. For, after all, the responsi-
bilities in this age, and supremely in this ancient city, of
one who is called here to dispense the word and sacra-
ments of the Master are neither slight nor small. It is
an age of restlessness and inquiry. It is a land where,
just in proportion as faith has been challenged to yield
its most blind assent, there are decaying belief and in-
creasing doubt.

Would to God, therefore, that from these walls there
might go forth — and that, too, not only in our Anglo-
Saxon speech, but in the ancient tongue of this ancient
people — a new message of love and of life to souls that
are now groping in the dark ! Would to God that we
Americans, who owe to Rome, with her treasures of
art and her wealth of Christian antiquities, so vast and
as yet so utterly unrequited a debt, might pay it back to
this land and this people by giving to them the treasure
of the saving and transforming gospel of a living and
compassionate Christ ! You have seen, my brother, the
visible and substantial rewards of your labors in the
events of the past week. May they be but the earnest
and beginning of yet nobler and more enduring rewards
which are yet to come ! Because of the witness which
this church shall bear to Christ and His truth, may mul-
titudes now groping in ignorance or clouded by supersti-

The Witness of Saint Paul in Rome. 255

tion come to know the transforming power of a pure and
Scriptural faith, and the comfort of simple and childlike
trust in a living and personal Christ ! In this free king-
dom, where at last the principle of religious liberty has
won such generous recognition, may God make this a
free church, — its doors wide open to all sorts and con-
ditions of men, its every ministration holding forth none
other than that truth which makes men free indeed I

XV.

SERMON.

And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me and
keep me in this way that I go, . . . so that I come again
to my father'' s house in peace, then shall the Lord be my
God ; and this stone which I have set up for' a pillar shall
be God^s house. — Genesis xxviii. 20-22.

The common and familiar things of life are forever sur-
prising us by their nearness to the things that are seem-
ingly uncommon and remote. Looking at men from the
outside, their aims and activities appear to us tame and
secular and transient. Here is a workman toiling for
his wage ; yonder is a woman nursing her babe ; over
against us is a household busy with its thousand petty
interests, — and all alike seem centred in the present.
But now and then some chance breath of adverse for-
tune, some startling incident, some sudden joy or grief,
lifts the veil, and we see how imperfectly we have judged.
The workman has seen a vision ; the nursing mother has
heard a voice ; the busy houseliold has been touched by
some common sorrow or some common inspiration. Into
these lives there has broken, now in one way and now
in another, the consciousness of another life, higher than

The American Church in Paris. 257

the senses, more ennobling and more enduring than the
present, — the life, in one word, of God and the soul.

Something like this had happened to that young man
of whom we have been reading this morning. In one
aspect of it, what a homely and commonplace picture it
is ! Here is a youth growing up among pagan surround-
ings, who is bidden, after that elder fashion of parental
authority which in such matters we Americans have
long since learned to disesteem and disregard, to go and
find a wife among his mother's kinsfolk. " And Isaac
called Jacob and blessed him, and charged him, and said
unto him. Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of
Canaan." This youth of godly nurture was not to marry
a heathen. '' Arise ; go to Padam Aram, . . . and take
thee a wife from thence of the daughters of Laban, thy
mother's brother." That was the errand on which the
young man set out. It does not require much imagina-
tion to picture the thoughts with which he journeyed, —
the youthful enthusiasm, the delight of new-found free-
dom, the eager interest of a traveller amid unfamiliar
scenes, and also the shrewd curiosity of an acute and
forecasting mind ; for the traveller is Jacob, remember.
All these, I think, we can readily conceive to have gone
along with him. And then there comes the solitary en-
campment for the night, with the stone for a pillow, and
then the vision, — the suddenly opened heavens, the
" ladder set up on the earth," " the angels of God ascend-
ing and descending on it," and the Lord standing above it.
Ah, what a new world broke then, it may have been for
the first time, upon the consciousness of that young soul !

17

258 Waymarks,

Trained in devout routine, nurtured from infancy in the
simple religion of his fathers, there came that night, as
there comes in some such pause and stillness to every
young soul to-day, the vision of the Lord. His journey
to Padan Aram, the home and the flocks that he had left
behind him, the pleasures and possessions that lay be-
fore him, — a few moments ago, and as he fell asleep
these had seemed the sum of life ; and now that life had
come to have another meaning and another end, for
" behold, the Lord stood above it."

It is such a vision which explains our presence here
to-day. Surely the occasion which assembles us is as
suggestive as it is unique. Strangers most of us in
this strange city, we have gathered here to give to God
this holy and beautiful house to be His own forever.
Look around, 1 pray you, and see with what cost and
massiveness it has been builded. These stately outlines,
these enduring columns, this unstinted expenditure,
these ample proportions, do not suggest the transient or
the temporary. No, they are the fitting expression of
an enduring provision for enduring wants, — wants that
no restlessness can smother, nor any frivolity ultimately
ignore or forget.

We Americans are supposed to be a somewhat flip-
pant people, more or less intoxicated by a prosperity
which is largely accidental, and which has made us fond
of pleasure, display, and change. These are the tastes,
we are told, which make us swarm wherever life is the
most gay and amusement the most abundant ; and
under such conditions, we are told also, we are very apt

The American Church in Paris. 259

many of us to forget our earlier nurture, and especially
to let go those more sacred traditions which once hound
us to duty and to God.

I am not here, my fellow-countrymen, to dispute that
charge nor to bandy words with those who have made it.
Alas ! must it not be owned that, in part, at any rate, it
is true, and that there are those whose religion has
seemed to be geographical, — of force and authority on
one continent, and somehow suspended as to its duties
and obligations in another ? For one, I have no desire
to ignore a fact which we may all wisely recognize, and
which we must needs profoundly deplore.

But in doing so, there remains that other fact, —
thank God for those tokens of it which greet us else-
where, as well as here ! — of which this building and
these services are the witnesses. Yes, the wayfarer may
forget his earlier nurture and his Father's house, but
there comes a moment when, amid the peril and loneli-
ness of a foreign land, that happens to more than one
such which happened to Jacob on his way to Padan
Aram ; and his eyes are opened, — opened to his own
need, opened to the over-arching care that broods above
liim, opened to the nearness of the life that is to that
other which is to be. In other words, we may outrun
our earlier traditions and our accustomed restraints, but
we cannot outrun those deepest hungers which, to-day
as of old, utter themselves in the prayer of the fugitive
David : " From the ends of the earth I cry unto thee to
help me : lead me to the Rock that is higher than I."

It is to satisfy those hungers that these services long

260 Waymarhs.

ago were instituted, and that this house has now been
reared. It is a witness at once to our individual needs
and to our belief, as a nation, in God and His revelation
of grace and salvation through Jesus Christ. I know
that the existence of tiiat belief has been doubted if not
denied, and that our American republic has been
widely represented as a nation which, having no estab-
lished religion, has hardly any at all. I may not tarry
here to show how false is any such impression alike to
the history of our past and the witness of our present.
Those who have read the one do not need to be reminded
how the foundations of our republic were laid by God-
fearing men, nor do Churchmen need to be told that
Washington and some of his most illustrious associates
were children of the same household of faith which
gathers us to-day. And as little do intelligent students
of the religious history of our own land need to have
demonstrated to them the fact that the most aggressive
form of modern Christianity to-day, that whose missionary
activities, whether at home or abroad are the most gener-
ous in their expenditures and the most untiring in their
efforts, is that Anglo-Saxon Christianity which finds its
home in the United States of America. Indeed, of what
is this sanctuary the token, roared though I know it is,
in good part, by the gifts of those who are resident here,
— nay, what is the faithful and patient ministry of him
who has voluntarily expatriated himself that he may
labor here, but tokens of how that American Church
whose children we are cares for her children, so far as
she is able, wherever they may go, and follows them, as

The American Church in Paris. 261

the angel of God followed Jacob, into a foreign land
with that incomparable message of hope and consolation
without which life becomes an intolerable burden, and
the grave the gateway of despair.

Such is to be the mission of this holy house and of
him who ministers in it. But while this fact is that
which of necessity must be most prominent in our
thoughts to-day, we may not, on the other hand, forget —
nay we must needs rejoice gratefully to remember —
those many links which connect this occasion and this
sanctuary with the land in which it is reared, and with
those venerable traditions of Galilean Christianity among
which it finds itself. This is a chapel, with a worship
in the English tongue, and according to a ritual which
to many a Frenchman is severely plain. Nay, more, it
is also true that as children of the Anglican Reforma-
tion, we are not able to find our spiritual home in sanc-
tuaries which acknowledge that unwarranted claim of
Papal supremacy which once and again the Galilean
Church has so courageously disowned and resented.^
But on the other hand, can we who are Churchmen ever
forget that the Liturgy which England gave to us was
substantially the Liturgy which, long before, France had
given to England. A comparison of the earliest litur-
gical forms, which have come down from ancient times,
with our own Eucharistic office, furnishes strong reasons
for believing that tJiat primitive use which toward the
beginning of the second century was introduced into

1 The Gallican Church, Lloyd, pp. 40, 63, 64, 78, 83, 84.

262 Waymarks.

Gaul by missionaries from Asia Minor was the parent,
in all essential features, first of the Anglican Liturgy,
and through that of our own.^ When toward the close
of the sixth century Augustine landed in England for
the purpose of evangelizing the pagan Saxons, he found
that a church already existed there with an episcopate
and a ritual of its own, derived from Gallican sources.
He would fain have displaced it, as we know, with that
Roman Liturgy which he had brought with him. But
with a wisdom beyond his time, and in striking contrast
with the subsequent policy of the Roman Church, the
great Gregory to whom he appealed replied, in words
which may well be the rule of those who are engaged
in the weighty business of liturgical revision and en-
richment in our own day : —

^'Thou, my brother, art acquainted with the customs of
the Roman Church, in which thou wast brought up. But it
is my pleasure that if thou hast found anything which would
better please God ... in the Gallican or in any other
church, thou shouldst carefully select that. . . . For things
are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the
sake of good things. Select therefore from each church
those things that are pious, religious, and rightful; and
when thou hast collected them into one whole, instil this
into the minds of the Angles for their use."

It is not easy to imagine a more exact description of
the origin of our own Liturgy, — using that word both
in its more precise and more general sense, than such
language. But while, therefore, we gratefully remember
the many and various sources to which our American

^ Vide "The Prayer Book : its History," etc, Dauiel, pp. 11, 12.

The American Church in Paris, 263

prayer book has been indebted, it belongs to us here, and
to-day, especially to call to mind that primary source to
which it owes so much ; I mean the earliest formularies
of Galilean worship.

A living church, however, is one which is marked not
only by an orthodox worship, but by a Scriptural
and evangelical teaching. And how can we who are
American Churchmen ever forget how much we owe to
the witness for God and His truth, of that long line of
saints and heroes and martyrs, which, beginning with
that great prelate and doctor, Iren^us, Bishop of Lyons,
runs on through all the eventful history of France,
down to this hour ? In our American metropolis, in
a sanctuary dear to many of us here, there is a win-
dow which commemorates Saint Martin of Tours, that
soldier first, and pupil of Athanasius later, who as Bishop
of Tours in the fourth century, by liis resolute refusal to
join with the Spanish bishops in the persecution of the
heretical Priscillianists, taught to his fellow-ecclesiastics
and the whole Christian world a rare lesson of religious
toleration ; and who thus, in an age which, alas, could
not understand it, became a witness to that great
principle of Religious Liberty, which, centuries after,
found its sure refuge and its abiding resting-place on our
American shores. My brethren, as we rear our altar
on this French soil to-day can we forget prophets and
apostles such as these ? nay more, can we forget those
others who were, if not all of them tactually, yet most
surely spiritually their successors, — Fdn^lon and Pascal
and Lacordaire on the one hand, and those Huguenot

264 Way marks.

heroes and martyrs, on the other, who from age to age
have spoken and suffered for Christ ? Surely, in a
sense the deepest and most real to us who are here,
that is no alien or foreign soil which has bred such
witnesses as these for our Master and theirs ! Gladly
and gratefully do we claim our spiritual kinship with
them all, and thank God, as we shall do presently in
yonder Eucharist, for the good examples of all these,
His servants, and our brethren in Jesus Christ!

And yet again : on this day, dedicated as it is by the
chief magistrate of our country to the sacred duty and
privilege of national thanksgiving, — a day most happily
chosen, as I think you will agree with me, for the
consecration of this American church, — must we not
also gladly recall another tie which binds us to France,
and which makes our relations to this people, in one as-
pect of them, more sacred and tender than to any other ?

On an American Thanksgiving-day, at home, as you
will remember, it has long been our custom, in con-
nection with our Church services, to review our national
history, and to enumerate the various occasions for
gratitude or admiration which such a review suggests.
Was there ever more appropriate occasion for such a
retrospect than to-day ? — first, in view of all that in the
happy completion of this Christian sanctuary we who
are here have especially to be thankful for, and then in
view of the manifold blessings and the marvellous
prosperity which have been vouchsafed to our native
land. Can any American recognize the profound
significance of all that is coming to pass in his own

The American Church in Paris. 265

country without an equal sense of awe and wonder in
view of its august suggestions ? We are accounted a
boastful people, easily misled by the superficial blunder
of mistaking territorial and numerical bigness for
national greatness ; and the imputation, in view of much
that is said and written is not altogether without warrant.
But it is not what we may say or think of ourselves that
compels us to recognize the tremendous possibilities of
our national future, so much as what has been deliber-
ately predicted by others. In a recent work on the
" Possible Future and the Present Crisis" of America^ I
find the words of two men of whose calm and unimpas-
sioned judgment of facts, whatever we may think of
them in other regards, there can be no smallest question.
Neither of them is an American, nor, so far as I am
aware, have they any smallest sympathy with American
institutions or ideas, but each of them represents a mind
of the highest rank and an authority which in their several
departments is supreme. Says one of these, the late Mr.
Darwin, " There is apparently much truth in the belief
that the wonderful progress of the United States, as
well as the character of the people, are the results
of natural selection ; for the more energetic, restless,
and courageous men from all parts of Europe have
emigrated, during the last ten or twelve generations,
to that great country, and have there succeeded best.
Looking at the distant future, I do not think that the
Rev. Mr. Zincher^ takes an exaggerated view when he

1 Our Country, by Rev. J Strong. New York : Baker and Taylor.

2 An English divine and writer.

266 Waymarhs,

says: 'All other series of events — as that which
resulted in the culture of mind in Greece, and that which
resulted in the Empire of Rome — only appear to have
purpose and value when viewed in connection with, or
rather as subsidiary to, the great stream of Anglo-Saxon
emigration to the West.' " Wrote Mr. Herbert Spencer,
speaking of the future of our country : —

'<One great result is, I think, tolerably clear. From
biological truths it is to be inferred that the eventual
mixture of the allied varieties of the Aryan races forming the
population will produce a more powerful type of man than
has hitherto existed, and a type of man more plastic, more
adaptable, more capable of undergoing the modifications
needful for complete social life. I think, whatever difficulties
they may have to surmount, and whatever tribulations they
may have to pass through, the Americans may reasonably
look forward to a time when they will have produced a civi-
lization grander than any the world has known."

And if it be objected that these are vague and gen-
eral statements, there are others which may easily be
verified, not vague nor general nor difficult to under-
stand. Here is one of them : at the present ratio of
increase, another century will give to our country 700,-
000,000 of people. Here is another : between 1870 and
1880 the manufactures of France increased in value
1230,000,000 ; those of Germany, 1430,000,000 ; those
of Great Britain, 1580,000,000 ; and those of the United
States, $1,030,000,000. Or, to turn from past growth
to future possibilities, again : if you would get a con-
ception of the territorial extent of our country, take the
State of Texas alone and lay it on the face of Europe,

The American Church in Paris, 267

and this American " giant, resting on the mountains of
Norway on the north, with one palm covering London,
and the other reaching out to Warsaw, would stretch
himself across the kingdom of Denmark, across the em-
pires of Germany and Austria, across northern Italy,
and lave his feet in the Mediterranean." ^ And to add
one more group of statistics, perhaps more impressive
than any other to a certain class of minds, consider the
actual wealth of the United States. Great Britain is
by far the richest nation of the Old World ; but our
wealth exceeds hers by 1276,000,000. From 1870 to
1880 we produced 1732,000,000 of the precious metals
alone from our own soil ; and to-day the $43,612,000,000
which is the estimated wealth of the United States is
" more than enough to buy the Russian and Turkish em-
pires, the kingdoms of Sweden and Norway, Denmark
and Italy, together with Australia, South Africa, and
South America, — lands, mines, cities, palaces, factories,
ships, flocks, herds, jewels, moneys, thrones, sceptres,
diadems, and all the entire possessions of 177,000,000
of people." 2 And this is true of a people with a repub-
lican form of government, already demonstrated to be
at once the most stable and the most elastic, and speak-
ing a language of which long ago Jacob Grimm, the
German philologist, wrote, " It seems chosen, like its
people, to rule in future times in a still greater degree
in all the corners of the earth," until, as he elsewhere
predicts, the language of Shakspeare shall become the
language of mankind.

1 Our Country, by Rev. J. Strong, p. 16. 2 ibid., pp. 112, 113.

268 Way marks.

This is the marvellous present and the marvellous fu-
ture of our country, as others, not we, have described them.
But can we forget, I ask again, the events in which this
greatness took its rise ? Wrote Count d'Aranda, after
signing the Treaty of Paris in 1773, to his sovereign, the
King of Spain : " This federal republic is born a pygmy ;
... a day will come when it will be a giant." But
would the pygmy ever have come to its birth at all if
it had not been for the outstretched hand of France,
and the timely help of Lafayette and those who were
his brave associates ? Can we who are Americans ever
cease to remember those whose brave and heroic sup-
port when, so far as all other sympathy or countenance
were concerned, we stood alone made it possible that our
republic should survive its baptism of blood and live to
take its place among the nations of the earth ? Surely,
as we consecrate this house to-day and lift to heaven our
grateful praises for the blessings which are ours here
and our fellow-countrymen's at home, we may not forget
that they were Frenchmen who at the first made possible
all that has since then come to pass.

And so, as we dedicate this house to God and His
glory and honor, I would lift this prayer for the people
among whom it is reared : May God bless the French
republic and all who dwell within her borders. May the
two great peoples — theirs and ours — go forward hand
in hand, not merely in material prosperity, but in that
righteousness which alone exalteth a nation. May yonder
doors stand ever open to welcome all who may long for
the message and the help of Him who came to incarnate

The American Church in Paris. 269

that righteousness, to tell the world of the true brother-
hood of man, and to reveal in His own person the only
service in which there is perfect freedom and perfect
fraternity. There are aching and empty hearts in this
great and glittering capital. May this be the refuge in
which, whatever tongue they speak, not a few of them
may find at once pardon and hope and peace. And so
from these portals may there never cease to stream forth
to bless and illumine mankind the clear and steadfast
hght of the gospel of Jesus Christ. French munificence
has lately reared its stately gift, with flashing torch up-
lifted, at the portal of the metropolis of our Western
World ; and to-day we place here a gift to France, not
less costly and not less helpful surely, to fling o'er all
this tangled skein of modern continental life a light like
none that " ever was on land or sea," — the light of Him
who said, " I am the light of the world ; he that follow-
eth me shall not walk in darkness." God keep it bright !
God make it to shine clear and strong and steadfast !

My dear brother,^ this is a happy and blessed day for
you. May I not in the presence of this your flock offer
to you, and through you to them, the congratulations
that are glowing in many hearts to-day on both sides of
the Atlantic ? I account myself happy that it has fallen
to my lot to be the bearer of those congratulations, and
to tell you how glad and happy are we of that Diocese of
New York from which I come, in view of the success
which has crowned your efforts. In that, your mother
diocese, and in the parish in which it was once my
^ The preacher here addressed the rector.

270 Waymarks.

privilege to serve, you first received your commission as
a minister of Jesus Christ. With that diocese you are
still, as a presbyter, canonically connected, even as from
it — as I know you gratefully remember — you have re-
ceived again and again munificent assistance in the task
of which to-day we commemorate the completion. What
a noble completion it is ! They who have come here
this morning are witnesses of the consummation of a
work which has cost you and your people more anxious
hours than any but you yourselves can know. May I
not tell you for myself and this whole congregation how
much we honor you for the rare courage with which you
and those who have stood by you have toiled and striven
and waited ? In the completion of this noble church a
work has been accomplished whose influence, 1 believe,
we who are gathered here can only imperfectly conceive.
But be it greater or less than we anticipate, nothing can
dim the record of that steadfast faith and that unwearied
patience with which you and yours have labored. May
God make this " psalm incorporate in stone " a daily
consolation and inspiration to you and them in all the
work that lies before you ! May He help you to witness
for Him in this pulpit and to minister before Him at
yonder altar ; and so, out and up from psalm and sacra-
ment and sermons, may you and your flock, with Jacob
at Peniel, climb into closer fellowship with Him to
whose honor this holy house is reared, until yours too
and theirs shall be the pilgrim's vision and the pilgrim's
cry, — " This is none other but the house of God, and
this is the gate of heaven."

INTRODUCTORY TO THE POWERS AND THE
POWER OF THE EPISCOPATE.

The history of the Ejjiscopal Church in the United States
would be very imperfectly told, if it did not record the re-
markable services of its missionary Episcopate. The exi-
gencies of sparsely settled regions in the West and Southwest,
where the Church was largely unknown, and where without a
supporting constituency it was impossible to organize dioceses,
made it necessary to provide for an oversight and adminstra-
tion which should also unite with it much of the work of the
pioneer and the missionary. To this end, in the year 1835,
the Church chose its first missionary Bishop, the gallant
and lion-hearted Kemper, and sent him to be Bishop of
Missouri and Indiana. His jurisdiction in fact included
almost the whole Northwest, and for nearly twenty years,
and until elected Bishop of Wisconsin, he gave himself to
his work with contagious and undiscouraged enthusiasm.

Bishop Kemper was the first in a succession of missionary
Bishops who have been among the best gifts of the
American Church. Among them have been Scott of
Oregon, Randall of Colorado, and their like, in earlier days,
and Lay and Robert Elliott and their like, in later, all now
gone to their reward, while among the living are men to
whose wisdom, energy, and self-sacrifice the Church will find
itself increasingly indebted as the years go on.

Among these it is no disparagement to others to say that
the name of the first missionary Bishop of Nebraska, Dr.
Robert Harper Clarkson, will always stand pre-eminent. Of
border ancestry (he was born in 182G, in Gettysburg, Pa.,

272 Way f narks.

near the Maryland line) Dr. Clarkson united in himself the
vigor of the North and the sunny charm of the South. Of
gentle birth and lineage, a college-bred man, with a sincere
love of letters, he was always and everywhere a man of the
people, and he was able to unite in himself the most unbend-
ing loyalty to the traditions of the Church whose son he Was
with the kindliest and largest sympathies toward all sorts
and conditions of men. In its early history in the West the
Church had no easy task. It found itself in communities
which were usually not so much hostile to it as good-
naturedly contemptuous or indifferent. It was almost
utterly unknown, and its historic claim, to those bred of
Puritan ancestry, or with equal disesteem and distaste for
any other than a highly emotional type of religious teaching
and worship, presented, practically, almost no points of con-
tact. It was the calling — no easy one — of the missionary
Bishop and his clergy to create these, — to establish the
entente cordiale, and then hj means of it to make men love
the Church and her services because they had learned to love
and trust the men who brought them to them.

In this work Bishop Clarkson was a prince-Bishop,
certainly not because of the state in which he lived or
travelled, — the Apostle who was a tent-maker was hardly
more familiar with hardships than this his true successor, —
but because his nobility of speech and service won upon all to
whom he came. The present Diocese of Nebraska, with its
Cathedral, Churches, and schools, is his worthy monument j
and when, all too soon, the time came for one who had worn
himself out in the service to rest from his labors, he left a
large and strongly rooted work behind him.

To succeed him in the charge of that work the Diocese of
Nebraska called, in the j^ear 1885, a man who was like-minded;
and it was the happy privilege of one who had known him in
his earliest ministry, and who had learned then to recognize
his earnest and devout character and his fervid missionary

Powers and Power of the Episcopate. 273

spirit, to preach on the occasion of his consecration on
Saint Matthias' Da}^, Feb. 24, 1885, in St. John's Church,
Detroit, Mich., the sermon which here follows. It is note-
worthy that since then the Diocese of Nebraska has become
two jurisdictions, over the larger and newer of which a
missionary Bishop has been placed, — the successor of Bishop
Clarkson, the Right Rev. Dr. George Worthington, still
continuing Bishop of Nebraska.

18

XVI.

THE POWERS AND THE POWER OF THE
EPISCOPATE.

In entering upon the task which has been assigned to
me this morning, I may not refrain from recognizing the
obvious inappropriateness, from one point of view at any
rate, of my attempting to discharge it. Whatever may
be fitting on other occasions, it would seem as if there
could be little difference of opinion as to what is fitting
here. It belongs to age and experience in the Episcopal
Office, and not to comparative youth and inexperience,
to inculcate those lessons which are appropriate to this
hour and to those august solemnities to which we are in
a little while to proceed. It belongs to a large and
varied Episcopal service to tell the people what are the
duties and responsibilities of the Episcopal Office, and to
tell this, our brother elected, how best he may discharge
them. And in length of service and in largeness of
experience your preacher is equally poor. Himself a
novice, called little more than a twelve-month since to
take up those large tasks which to-day are to be laid
upon another, he might well have come here, not to
speak, but to listen, content to remember that, as
always in the college of the Episcopate, so here pre-

Powers and Power of the Episcopate. 275

eminently it is the office of " them that are elders "
among us to teach and to admonish.

But if I had not been constrained by the force of that
triple command which has been laid upon me, by our
venerable and beloved Presiding Bishop, by the Bishop
of this diocese, and by our brother this day to be con-
secrated, I might venture to remind myself of a usage
of our Mother Church in connection with occasions
such as this, not without advantages which might make
it worthy of imitation among us. The preacher at the
consecration of a Bishop in the Church of England is
not a bishop, but a presbyter ; and the custom has at
least this merit, that it affords opportunity for setting
forth the office and work of a Bishop from a standpoint
without, rather than within. Doubtless they best know
the duties and obligations of a Bishop's Office who have
long borne them, and the most intelligent standing-
ground in judging of any calling, and its responsibilities
is not without, but within. Yet, as in other things, so
here it must needs be of advantage, sometimes at any
rate, to look at the office and vocation of a Bishop as
those look at it who stand apart from it, not as
unfriendly critics, but as friendly and filial observers.

It is in this spirit and with this purpose, then, that I
venture to ask your attention. Pray, with me, that
another Wisdom than my own may guide and restrain
and enlighten me !

In the tenth chapter of Saint Matthew's Gospel, at the
first verse, and in the first chapter of Saint Paul's Second
Epistle to Timotliy, at the sixth and seventh verses,
there occur respectively those words : —

276 Waymarks,

^' And when He had called unto Him His twelve Apostles,
He gave them power."

''Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up
the gift of God which is in thee by the putting on of my
hands. For God hath not given to us the spirit of fear 5 but
of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."

There are two views of such an occasion as that which
assembles us to-day, equally familiar, if not equally
accepted. The one is that an office-bearer in the
Church of God who has been tried and tested in an
inferior post of duty is to be advanced to a higher, and
that, in connection with such promotion or advancement
he is to be clothed with new dignities and entrusted
with new powers. In this view the analogies of secular
life and civil or municipal office-bearing occur at once
to our minds. Here is a servant of the State, who, by
the suffrages of his fellow-citizens, or the appointment of
the executive, has been chosen to some responsible
office. As he comes to its threshold there are certain
ceremonies of initiation, or some formal oaths and
declarations, by which he is to become legally qualified
for his new place and admitted to its duties. All
through our civil and military systems of government,
and wisely, there runs some law or usage looking to this
end and providing for its accomplishment. Yesterday
our fellow-citizen was only our fellow-citizen, and no
more. To-day he has been chosen, it may be, for some
high and honorable office. To-morrow, perhaps, he will
take the oath of his office and enter upon the discharge
of its duties. And in doing so there will come to him

Powers and Power of the Episcopate* 277

the right, not merely to draw his salary and to assume
an official title, but to exercise certain powers which are
inherent in the nature of his office, or have been con-
ferred upon it by enactment of law. He may appoint
certain subordinates, he may veto certain proposed
enactments, he may pardon certain criminals, and in
the exercise of all these powers he may be largely, if
not solely, responsible to himself, to his own conscience,
and only indirectly to his coadjutors in the business of
government, or to the people.

Now, it is undoubtedly true that there is a very close
analogy in many respects between powers thus con-
ferred and those with which our brother is to be en-
trusted this day. The Church is in the world as an
organization ; as a Divine organization, it is true, and
with obligations not so much secular and legal as they
are moral and spiritual, — but still, as an organization.
Not as a disembodied spirit, but as a visible kingdom
or society is it bidden to go forward to its work. And
in this organized and visible society there must of ne-
cessity be those who administer its laws and confer its
authority and execute its discipline. There must be
office-bearers, as well as an office to be borne. There
must be those who commission, as well as those who are
commissioned. There must be overseers, as well as
work and workers to be overseen. And in all these
various functions and relations there must be a right
distribution of responsibility, and a law of due submis-
sion and subordination to duly constituted and rightful
authority.

278 Waymarks^

And hence there arises, the moment we come to
speak of the Episcopate, the question of its powers.
We cannot admit the existence of such an office as that
of a Bishop in the Church of God without admitting
also that along with the office there must go a certain
definite authority and certain specific powers. If we
believe (as most surely we do believe, or else we have
no business to be here) that the office is not one of
human invention, but, howsoever gradually, as some may
believe, taking on its more definite and specific form, of
Divine origin and institution, then we must needs be-
lieve that, as in the beginning the Divine Founder of
the Church gave to His Apostles certain inalienable
powers, so He has willed that something answering to
these powers is to remain with those who shall come
after them. They were to set in order the things that
remained unorganized. They were to ordain elders in
every city. They were to set apart those others who
were to serve tables. They were to confirm the souls
of the baptized by the laying on of hands. They were
to decide questions of worship and of discipline, not
alone, indeed, nor without mutual counsel. They were
to serve, but they were also to rule. They were to
preach, but they were also to commission others to
preach. In a word, over all that infant energy and
activity of the new faith, they were to be Iitigko'ttoi —
overseers — leading and governing, ordaining and con-
firming, correcting and restraining those whom Christ
and His Church had entrusted to their care. Such, in
brief, were the powers to be exercised, all of them, let

Powers and Power of the Episcopate. 279

us never forget, under the guidance and inspiration of
the seven-fold gifts of the Holy Ghost, with Avhich the
Master clothed His first Apostles ; and such are the
powers of those who to-day, however unworthy, are in
a very real sense their successors.

And if we ask, Where now are we to look, in this our
own age and Church for a more specific definition of
these powers ? the answer is, to custom, to canon law,
and supremely to the Holy Scriptures. Some things are
matters of usage, others are defined by precise enact-
ment of canon law, and behind all these is the voice
of the Holy Ghost as it speaks to us from the pages of
the New Testament. When in the book of the Acts
of the Apostles we read how, to the Church at Antioch,
" the Holy Ghost said, separate me Paul and Barnabas
for the work whereunto I have called them," we get a
clear and explicit point of departure, in the light of
which we may read all that follows. As, step by step,
the little handful of believers grows and multiplies and
disperses itself abroad, as that expectant company in
the upper room is enlarged till it becomes a fully organ-
ized and aggressive Christian society, we see how, step
by step, the new powers were ordained to match the
new responsibilities, and how the freedom and infor-
mality of an earlier and cruder condition of things gave
place to one in which, as with the deacon and presbyter,
each had his separate work and was clothed with his
several powers ; so with that other, who, father and
brother to all the rest, was set over them in the Lord
with the heavy burden, but no less with the definite
powers, of the Episcopate.

280 Waymarks.

And yet, when we have said all this, and I think you
will own that I have striven to say it with entire candor
and explicitness, is it not true that there remains some-
thing more to be said ? We turn back to that first com-
mission of which we read in the words just quoted to
you from Saint Matthew's Gospel. And what a signifi-
cant picture is that which it summons before us ! The
men who were commissioned there were bidden to do
the mightiest works which the world had ever seen :
" Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils, raise
the dead." This was their Lord's command. Well, as
we know, they obeyed it. Up and down that slumbrous,
sin-burdened world of theirs they went and preached,
and wrought, and healed. And all the while it was not
their powers — canonical, ecclesiastical, Episcopal —
that made them strong, but their power. " And when
He called unto Him His twelve Disciples He gave them
power." I do not forget that the word in the original
means more precisely " authority ; " but there could
have been no real and constraining authority if there
had not been behind it a human personality thrilled
through and through with a divine and irresistible
power. And so when we turn from the commission of
Christ to the twelve to that other commission of the
aged Apostle to the Gentiles to his son in the faith,
Timothy, we see that in substance and spirit the two
are one : " Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that
thou stir up the gift of God, wliich is in thee by the
putting on of my hands. For God hath not given to us
the spirit of fear ; but of power, and of love, and of a
sound mind."

Powers and Power of the Upiscopate. 281

Men and brethren! The powers of the Episcopate
are one thing ; the power of the Episcopate is quite an-
other. Need I say that I do not forget that in every
Episcopal office and function, the presumption is that
that which is done is done under the guidance, and in
submission j;o, the teaching and moving of God the
Holy Ghost ? But alas ! it does not need much read-
ing of history to remind us that men may be admitted
into the highest offices of the Church of God, concern-
ing whom it is not too much to say that nothing in their
lives or teaching gave any smallest evidence that they
had so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost ;
and while we may well rejoice that sucli dark pages in
the Churcli's life belong mainly to its past, we may not
forget that in every age of the Church and in every of-
fice of the ministry, there has been a tendency to con-
fuse its powers and its power, — to mistake the assertion
or the exercise of the one for the mighty and transcend-
ent spell of the other; in one word, to mistake that
which is in the voice of authority for that which is the
far mightier constraint of example, of wisdom, of love.

It is a mistake which we cannot too strongly or too
strenuously deprecate. A Bishop may not verily forget
that which is due to his office (though he can very well
afford not to be over-sensitive as to that which is due to
himself), and he may as little dis-esteem or neglect those
duly-regulated powers which the Church has put in his
keeping, not to rust, but to use. But he may wisely
remember that the frequent assertion of prerogative is
the surest road to its resistance, — that even the solemn

282 Waymarks.

dignity of the Episcopate may easily be in danger of
the " vain conceit of officialism," and that the genius of
an ecclesiastical martinet is the last spell with which,
in an age when, whether rightly or no, men cannot be
hindered from reading and thinking for themselves, a
bishop may attempt to conjure.

On the other hand, there is a power of the Episcopate,
real and mighty and lasting, and it is the power —

(a) First of all, of personal character. The phrase
may sound indefinite, but I think you see with me what
it stands for. In every other relation of life there are
men who are influential for good, not because they have
been lifted to a great place, but because they fill a
great place, as they would have filled a smaller one,
with a substantive, stainless, and righteous manhood.
They are known to speak the truth, and to live it, as
well as to speak it. They are known for their constancy
to duty, and to do it at every hazard. Whatsoever things
are pure and honest and lovely and of good report, they
not only think on these things, but daily and habitually
illustrate them. They fill their place in the world, not
in a spirit of self-seeking, but in large-hearted love and
sacrifice for the welfare of other men. They are not
swerved from the right by the clamor of any partisanship,
or the sneer of any critic. Day by day they lift their
lives into the clear light of those eternal moral sanctions
that stream from the throne of God, and strive to live
them in that light. Infirmities of temper, errors of
judgment, imperfections of intellectual attainment they
may have. ; but all that they are and do is ennobled by

Powers and Power of the Episcopate. 283

a lofty purpose and adorned by a stainless integrity.
And these men, wherever you find them in any earthly
community, are pre-eminently its men of power. The
multitude may not follow them, but it secretly trusts
and respects them. Their fellows may not applaud
them, but they do profoundly believe in them. And
when any crisis comes — when truth falleth in the
streets and equity cannot enter — these are the men to
w^hom the world turns to restore its lost ideals of truth
and goodness and righteousness, and to lead it back to
the light.

And what is true of men in every other relation of
life is true of that sacred office with which we are con-
cerned to-day. Yerily, in him who is to be a Bishop in
the Church of God we want a sound and adequate and
(it cannot be inappropriate to these days to remember)
a many-sided learning, a strong and clear faith, a stead-
fast and burning zeal ; but first of all and before all, as
the soil in which these and all other kindred graces are
to flourish, we want a strong and substantive personal
character.

{h) But again : the power of the Episcopate resides, I
submit also, in a judicious admixture of the paternal and
fraternal spirit. In a letter of Saint Augustine, Bishop
of Hippo, written to the presbyter whom Christendom
knows as Jerome, there occur these words : " And
indeed, 1 beg that you would, from time to time, correct
me when you see plainly that I need it. For although,
according to the titles of honors which the usage of
the Church has now established, the Episcopate is

284 Waymarks.

greater than the Presbytery, yet in many respects
Augustine is inferior to Jerome, though correction from
any manner of inferior ought not to be avoided or dis-
dained." Ah ! with what a spellof power must he have
taught and ruled who could so empty himself of merely
official superiority to one who was still liis brother. If
clergymen have, ordinarily, any one sentiment of which
they would, I confidently believe, most eagerly be rid,
it is that difference of ecclesiastical rank puts an end to
fraternal intercourse. That fatherly relation between
the bishop and his presbyters, which is one of the most
beautiful and gracious things in the organic life of the
Church, would be a far mightier power if it could always
be brightened and warmed by another relation not so
much fatherly as brotherly. There is a frank and
generous confidence, there is a cordial and willing de-
pendence, there is a wise distrust of one's own judgment,
there is a deference to another's opinion, which are
signs, not of weakness, but of strength. And in and
through all the often sad and painful business of admin-
istering reproof or discipline, or conveying admonition or
dissent, it is possible to weave a golden thread of loving
brotherhood which shall at once transform and illumine
the whole. " Rebuke not an elder, but entreat him as
a father, and the younger men as brethren." Inspired
words, indeed, which may we never consent to forget !

{c) Once more : the power of the Episcopate will be
found to consist, I think, not a little in its open-minded-
ness. It is a misfortune of that training which one
acquires in parochial duties, that it rarely involves a

Powers and Power of the Episcopate. 285

collision with minds that view what may be called
" burning questions " from other standpoints than our
own. The man who is called to the Episcopate is usu-
ally one who is summoned from the care of a large and
well-organized city parish. But such parishes are usually
made up of those who are drawn to a particular ministry
by their sympathy with its views and modes of thought.
And a minister thus environed by a congenial and like-
minded people, encounters little that educates him to
recognize the existence, even, of other opinions than his
own. He hears of them, reads of them, it is true ; but
oftener than otherwise it is apt to be through the
medium of books and periodicals written or edited by
those in sympathy with his own views. From such a
training he emerges to deal, it may be, with men, many
of whom are his peers in learning, years, and intelligence,
and whose rights within the Church are no less than his
own. To recognize those rights and to be just to them
is no easy task. To remember that the Church is a
church and not a sect, a whole and not a fragment.
Catholic before all, and therefore not Anglican, or Evan-
gelical, or Protestant, merely, — this is something that
belongs pre-eminently to one who would exercise the true
power of the Episcopate in days like these. I would not
be misunderstood here, and I will not be. For that
loose-jointed optimism which accounts one man's credo
as good as another's, which disregards or dis-esteems
the sacred obligation of the Church's historic formularies,
which forgets that before the life that is to be lived there
is not only a faith, but the Faith to be kept, I have tlie

286 Waymarhs.

scantiest respect. But we may not forget that, as in Apos-
tolic days there was the Pauline and the Petrine presen-
tation of the truths of the gospel, and in later days the
theology of a Clement of Alexandria on the one hand, and
of an Augustine on the other, so ever since then there
have been those great schools of thought and opinion in
the Church, neither of which I believe may wisely exist
without the other, and to welcome whose activities a wise
Bishop may well desire that he may have that breadth of
vision and that openness and candor of mind which shall
freely acknowledge their right to be, and if so, their
right to think and to speak.

{d) There is one other element of power in the
Episcopate, which, though I name it last, may well be
accounted the first and chief of all. It is consecration,
— the unreserved devotion of one's whole powers, soul,
body, and spirit, to the work of his high office. It is for
this that our brother is here to-day, and that fresh gift
of himself to God which we ask of him in these solemn
services, it is his to make day by day through all the
months and years of service that are before him. It is
for this that we ask for him the seven-fold gifts of God
the Holy Ghost, that, quickened by that mightiest
Power, he may keep nothing back from the service of
Christ and His Church. Happily a bishop in our
branch of the Church is largely emancipated from those
claims, partly of the State and partly of what is called
" society," which press upon him in other lands. But
none the less is he in danger of that secular spirit which
spends itself in matters of secondary importance and is

Powers and Power of the Episcopate. 287

engrossed in details of mere worldly business. It is true
that even a bishop may not unduly neglect these ; but
to hold himself to his high office as a chief shepherd
of the flock, is he pre-eminently called. And this
calling he can liope to fulfil only as he brings his gifts,
his office, his powers, day by day to the feet of his
Master, and by the surrender of self-will, by that
hearkening of the spiritual ear which listens for the
voice of God, by a spirit of unselfish devotion which
shames the careless and the idle in his flock, by love
unfeigned, and by a meekness and patience that are not
merely long-suffering, but inexhaustible, shows himself
to be possessed by that new manhood, that regenerated
heart and will, which shall enable him to say, " Not I,
but Christ who dwelleth in me ! "

Such are some of the elements of power in the Epis-
copate. There are others, but I may not stay to enu-
merate them, nor do you need that they should here be
recapitulated. They cannot altogether take the place
of outward authority, of canonical provisions, empower-
ments, and the like, but, breathing through them all,
the Spirit behind the form, the purpose above the
commission, they are, I think we must own, the spell
and secret of mightiest influence and most enduring
work.

It is such power that I pray may be yours, my brother,
as you take up the tasks and burdens that are to-day to
be laid upon you. If I do not congratulate you on as-
suming them, it is not because I do not thank God that
you have been called to the office of bishop, nor because

288 Waymarks.

I do not rejoice that the Church is to have in that office
the benefit of your ripe experience and your earnest and
devout Christian character. But I know your work
here, and how dear it must needs be to you ; and I
know, even better than yourself can yet know, what it
will cost you to go out from this people to the homeless
and lonely and ever anxious life and work of a bishop.
As I stand and look back upon your ministry I cannot but
remember that it has been richly and singularly favored.
From the days when you and I were striplings together,
working side by side in that eastern city where you in
your diaconate and I in the earlier years of my priesthood
learned to prize one another's friendship, all the way on
to this hour, yours has been the privilege of ministering
to those who were united and devoted in their attach-
ment to yourself, and in their love and loyalty to the
Church. Coming here as the successor of the gifted
and saintly Armitage, you had indeed no easy task ;
but this large and united congregation, its varied and
beneficent activities, the rare and unwearied band of
Christian laymen whom you have drawn around you or
held to you, the respect in which you are held in this
community and in this diocese by all your brethren, the
love and honor of your bishop (who gives you up to-day
I know well how reluctantly), — all these testify to the
faithfulness of your service and to its abundant fruitful-
ness. And can I congratulate you that you are called
upon to leave such a flock and such a work ? Can I
hide from myself or from you that you are going forth
to labors which will grow larger every day, and to cares

Powers and Power of the Episcopate. 289

and anxieties that will multiply and not diminish as the
years go by ? Ah, could we summon him whom you are
to succeed, and whose resplendent path of service you
are to follow, to speak to you of your work, do we not
know the tone of pathos which would come back into
that matchless voice of his as he recounted to you how
'' in journeyings often, in perils in the wilderness, in weari-
ness and painfulness, besides that which came upon him
daily, the care of all the churches," he had laid those
broad and deep foundations on which henceforth you are
to build ? No, my brother ; it is a word of sympathy
rather than of congratulation that springs to my lips
to-day, though I am not unmindful of the noble field and
opportunity which open before you. But I do thank
God that he has called you to this office, and that, in the
face of its large anxieties, you have so much to cheer
and support you. The unanimity with which your
brethren in Nebraska have called you to be their bishop,
and the earnestness with which they have repeated that
call have, verily, left you no choice ; and I am persuaded
that when you go to them they will show you by their
welcome and their co-operation how eager and steadfast
is their purpose to strengthen and sustain you in your
work.

And do not forget that behind them will be the flock
from whom you are parted to-day. The work of the
Church in Nebraska will have a new meaning hence-
forth, and a very precious one to them. Their hearts
go with you, and so, thank God, will their prayers and
their alms. It is thus that out of our sorrows and part-

19

290 ' Wai/marks.

ings comes the enlargement of our love and our sym-
pathy. As you go to Nebraska remember, then, that
your going will help to enlarge the heart of this people
and to widen the horizon of their highest interests, —
inspiring thought, which makes their loss their gain as
well, and which transfigures your new burdens and re-
sponsibilities into a sacred privilege !

My dear brother, may God make you sufficient for
these burdens, and when you are weary and heavy laden
with the greatness of the way, may He Himself remind
you that " God hath not given to us the spirit of fear, but
of POWER, and of love, and of a sound mind."

THE MISSION OF THE EPISCOPATE.

AVhex Dr. Samuel Seabury, first bishop of Connecticut, after
his consecration at Aberdeen, Nov. 14, 1784, by the Scottish
bishops, returned to the United States, his coming was re-
garded by many of the most devout people in New England
with unmixed apprehension and dismay. Prelacy and a mon-
archy had come to be with them almost identical terms.
There were traditions still fresh among them of earlier days
in the history of Puritanism when prelacy stood for cruelty,
intolerance, and the most rigid proscription. They honestly
feared it ; they wanted none of it ; and they made haste many
of them to proclaim that, whatever else religious liberty
might mean, it did not mean the admission or toleration
among them of a form of church government which they hon-
estly believed threatened the foundations of their civil and
religious order alike.

Such apprehensions, it is true, were not shared — at any
rate, to the same extent — by other colonies south of them.
It will always be to the honor, for instance, of the colon}?- of
Penn, on the banks of the Delaware, that another and
larger spirit prevailed there; and it was a happy augury of
the pacific influences whicli the Ej^iscopal Church was in
coming days to exercise upon religious strife and dissension
tliat the first bishop of Pennsylvania was the gentle William
White, whose long episcopate and saintly and benignant
presence as he went to and fro in the streets of Philadel-
phia were influences of enduring power throughout the whole
commonwealth.

More than forty years after that gracious episcopate was
ended one of his successors in the office of a bishop knelt for

292 Waymarhs.

consecration in that old St. Peter's in which White had
so long ministered, and of which the kneeling presbyter,
soon to be ordained a bishop, had himself been rector for
nearly a score of years. The contrast between the two
earliest consecrations to an American episcopate and this
later one was most imj^ressive. Seabury's and White's had
occurred each in a foreign land, and in the presence of a
mere handful of more or less interested but largely alien
spectators. The church to which they were to go had not
a half-dozen organized dioceses, and but a handful of clergy.
In many places, nay, in most places it was utterly un-
known, or known only to be despised. It was widely re-
garded as an uncongenial exotic, and its future was frankly
predicted to be one of speedy and mortifying failure.

A century afterwards there was consecrated in Philadel-
phia the Rev. Thomas F. Davies, D.D., LL.D., sometime
rector of St. Peter's Church, to be bishop of the Diocese of
Michigan. Trained in the Diocese of Connecticut, and iden-
tified with its literary and theological history by many ties, he
had been chosen to be the worthy successor of that rare man
Dr. Samuel S. Harris, whose brief but brilliant episcopate
in Michigan will long live in the grateful memory of Ameri-
can Churchmen ; and in that episcopal succession in which he
then took his place, he was — significant fact — the one hun-
dred and fifty-second bishop. Since White knelt at the
altar of St. Peter's the small and obscure communion had
grown to number some seventy living bishops, nearly as
many dioceses and missionary jurisdictions, some four thou-
sand clergy, with probably some three million people more or
less directly dependent upon their ministrations. On such
an occasion it seemed appropriate that something should be
said defining the nature and claims of the historic episcopate,
and indicating its mission to the American people. To this
end the sermon which follows was preached on Saint Luke's
Dav, Oct. 18, 1889, in St. Peter's Church, Philadelphia.

XVII.

THE CALLING OF THE EPISCOPATE.

As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost
said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work where-
unto I have called them.

And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands
on them, they sent them away. — Acts xiii. 2, 3.

These words, which are included in the Anglican
Office for the Consecration of a Bishop, are omitted
from our own. This fact alone, if there were no other
evidence of a difference of opinion as to what that was
which Saint Luke here describes, would sufficiently indi-
cate that the Church has not always been, as to its
nature, of one and the same mind. The Ordinal of the
Church of England would seem to imply that it was an
Ordination, or Consecration. The judgment of scholars,
who were Churchmen as well as scholars, has some-
times seemed to lean to that view of the transaction
which makes of it simply a designation to a particular,
and pre-eminently difficult and important, missionary
work.

It is not necessary for our present purpose to settle
this controversy, nor is it greatly material. We are

294 Waymarks.

here for a definite business, and for that business
we find in Holy Scripture, elsewhere, if not here,
abundant warrant. We are here not only because we
believe that Christ has planted a Divine Society in the
world, but that He Himself has ordained the mode of
its perpetuation. We are here because we believe that
to all men "diligently reading Holy Scripture and an-
cient authors it is," or, if it is not, it ought to be,
"evident, that" that Divine Society which we call the
Church of God in the world is not a ghost or a spectre,
but a visible and recognizable reality; that it has cer-
tain marks or " notes, " and that among these marks or
" notes, " no matter what its corruptions, or apostasies,
or heresies, in this or that or the other age, is not only
its Apostolic doctrine but its Apostolic fellowship.
We are here because we believe that Apostolic fellow-
ship to have meant no such invertebrate and acephalous
thing as merely a community of sympathy and identity
of ideas, but an organized brotherhood, with a rite of
initiation, and a rite of association, and an appointed
agency for the maintenance of its organic life and the
due transmission of its authority.

Our brother here has been elected to a large and diffi-
cult task, and has been called by the voice of the
Church in the Diocese to which he is presently to go,
to take upon him the duties and burdens of the Episco-
pate. Under such circumstances we can easily con-
ceive that it would be appropriate that those from
whom he is parting, and those among whom he is
presently to be numbered, should give him their good

The Calling of the Episcopate, 295

wishes and God-speed. I am persuaded that no one of
those to whom I speak this morning, that no one of
those who are soon to be his brethren in the office of the
Episcopate, that no one, here or elsewhere, who knows
and honors him for his winning and beautiful ministry,
would dream of withholding either.

But is this all that the Church has to give him, or
all that the requirements of this occasion demand ?
Most surely you will not say so. Most surely you will
agree with me that we have come here this morning
because we are persuaded that no man "taketh this
honor unto himself but he that is called of God as
was Aaron," and that that Divine call is to find its
evidence not alone in the election of a convention, or
in any inward conviction, but equally and always by
the transmission of an authority, having Scriptural and
Apostolic warrant, and conferred by Apostolic commis-
sion. Amid systems as various and, alas, as mutually
contradictory as the dissensions from which they have
arisen, we who are here are constrained to see in the
story of the infant life of the Church of God the unmis-
takable evidence that authority to exercise the ministry,
of whatever rank or degree, comes not from below but
from above, and that, as from the first, it was handed
down from Christ and then from His Apostles, and not
up from the people, or across from equals, so it has
been, or ought to have been, ever since.

In one word, we are here because we believe in the
Historic Episcopate, not merely as an historic fact but
as an historic necessity, — the historic sequence of a

296 Waymarks.

Divine purpose and plan, various in its transient and
temporary accidents, if you choose, but moving steadily,
and that not by the shaping of circumstances, but by the
guiding of the Holy Ghost, toward that form and char-
acter which, having once taken on, it has now retained,
whatever temporary obscuration of its primitive charac-
ter or degradation of its high purpose may have befallen
it, for wellnigh twenty centuries.

And therefore we are here to disown the theory that
the organic form of Christianity, as the Catholic Church
holds it and has perpetuated it, is merely the develop-
ment and outcome of civil and secular institutions,
amid which it originally found itself, any more than
the Atonement on Calvary was the outcome of the
Platonic or Aristotelian philosophies. Points of re-
semblance, points of contact, points of identity, even,
we may own, here and there, it may be, in the one as
in the others ; but we are here to-day, if I at all under-
stand the purpose of our coming, to affirm that yonder
volume does not more truly declare to us the means of
our salvation than it declares and defines that one pre-
eminent agency, the Church of the living God, with its
inspired message and its divinely instituted sacraments,
and divinely appointed threefold ministry, as the visi-
ble agency and instrument by which that salvation is to
be made known to men.

And here, at any rate, whatever may be proper else-
where, we are not called upon to go beyond this. How
truly a human body may be so designated which is more
or less maimed or mutilated is a question which the-

The Calling of the Episcopate. 297

ology may not find it easier to answer in one domain
than science in another. But in an age when there is
so much invertebrate belief, and when the tone of
mutual complacency is so great that one man's deliro
(I dream) is as good as another man's credo (I believe),
it is as well in connection with such an occasion as this
to understand the ground upon which we stand, and the
point from which we set out. The cause of the reunion
of Christendom will be greatly forwarded by the kindly
temper which strives to understand, and scorns to mis-
represent others ; but it will not be helped by the mis-
taken amiability which seeks to misinterpret or consents
to misrepresent ourselves.

I have said this much, and have endeavored to say it
with utmost plainness, because, unless I am mistaken,
the exigency of the hour demands it. But I have done
so mainly because it opens the way to that larger view
of our text and of this occasion to which, if possible,
we should ascend.

{a) For, first of all, and plainly enough, it belongs
to us to remember on such an occasion as this that there
is a past, and that we cannot divorce ourselves from it.
Interesting and impressive as even the coldest criticism
would be apt to own the service in which we are now
engaged, neither its impressiveness nor its intrinsic
appropriateness is the reason for our observance of those
solemn features which compose it. We did not origi-
nate, extemporize, or invent them. Their claim upon
us, first of all, resides in this: that they are a part of
that venerable and scriptural inheritance of which God

298 Waymarhs,

has put us in trust. In an age which, with its smart
sciolism, considers itself competent to invent a method
for every emergency, and extemporize a function for
every most august solemnity, it is enough for us that
we are here engaged in doing what "our fathers did
aforetime." That law of historic continuity which
Christ in His earlier ministry so consistently and in-
variably emphasized, from the day when at His home
in Nazareth He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath
dayi to those closing hours when, on the eve of His
crucifixion, He made ready to keep the Passover with
His disciples, 2 is still the Church's truest wisdom,
as it is daily coming more and more plainly to be
seen to be an essential element of her inmost strength.
The evolution of the Church, like the evolution of the
highest forms of physical and intellectual life, must
forever be along those lines which keep her present in
close and vascular connection with her past. No more
tragic lesson has been taught to Christendom than that
which salutes us, in this land and age, in the manifold
and mutually destructive divisions of that Christendom,
as to the folly and madness of the defiance of that law.
We are set, in a generation of ignorant and audacious
departures from primitive faith and practice, to say,
and to say it over and over again, "the old is better."
We are set to affirm that, howsoever it may have been
caricatured, overstated, or misunderstood, there is a
doctrine of Apostolic succession in teaching, in minis-
try, in fellowship, and that we are to guard it and per-

1 St. Luke iv. 16. 2 gt. Mark xiv. 14.

The Calling of the Episcopate. 299

petiiate it. Pre-eminent as are the truths of Christ's
personal relation to the personal soul, we may not for-
get that He has chosen to reveal and proclaim them
through an agency which binds those souls to one an-
other and to Him in the great as well as " good estate
of the Catholic Church." And this it is our bounden
duty to remember and to affirm, not less but more, be-
cause it is to many an unwelcome and unnecessary
affirmation, and one that, only late and slowly, men are
coming to own and accept.

[h) But when we have done this duty, we are not to
leave the other duty undone. And what is the other
duty, if it be not to remember that as there is a past,
and that we must not get out of touch with that, so
there is a present, and that we must be careful to get
into touch with that ? The fact of all others most in-
spiring in our land and day is this, that never before
was the Church whose children we are so earnestly at
work to understand the situation in the midst of which
she finds herself, and so strenuous by any and every
lawful means to adjust herself to its demands. An
alien, as men perversely miscalled her, in the begin-
ning, from the spirit of our republican institutions and
the genius of the American people, she has not failed to
show that she is loyal to the one, and that she under-
stands the other. Not always nor everywhere wise in
the manner or the methods of her original approach to
those whom she has sought to win, she has consented to
unlearn not a little of her earlier stiffness, and largely
to disown a temper of aristocratic reserve and exclu-

300 Way marks.

siveness. As in England, so in America, she is no
longer the church of a class or a caste, but pre-
eminently, at any rate in some of her chiefest centres,
the church of the people.

Not, however, let me say, in a spirit of amiable
indifferentism. It is a conspicuous infirmity of the
religious activities of our time, that in their desire to
commend themselves to those whom they seek to in-
fluence, they have not always remembered that the
last method of effectively doing so is one of excessive
complaisance and weak and worldly concession. The
architecture of ecclesiastical buildings and places of
religious worship in our day, the tone, not unfre-
quently, of our pulpits, the characteristics of worship,
the speech and manners of the clergy, have all revealed
a danger lest, in the aim to be human and fraternal, the
Church and religion may very easily become secular and
careless and worldly. In the statement of doctrine it is
well, undoubtedly, that the parish priest should aim to
translate the speech and the idioms of other days into
our own ; but there is sometimes heard in the pulpit a
timid concession to popular clamor, or popular fancy,
which, in its spirit, is of the very essence of instability
and incertitude, and in its influence at once deteriorat-
ing and debilitating. " Stand fast " (o-rT^A^ere), says the
Apostle, "in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made
you free, "^ and it is worth while to consider whether
the liberty with which a Christian minister is endowed
is not the liberty of constancy, rather than, in faith and

1 Galatians v. 1.

The Calling of the Episcopate. 301

ritual and manners, the liberty of mere vagrancy. In
her efforts to adapt herself to all sorts and conditions
of men, the Church may indeed well remember her
Master's command to condescend to men of low estate.
But she is to descend, to condescend^ not that she may
stay on some lower level of truth and reverence and order,
but that, reaching down to lost and guilty men, she may
lift them up to every higher ideal of goodness and
nobleness and beauty. I hardly know how to say what
I want to say without seeming in some degree to dis-
parage efforts and enterprises with which, in their aim,
I have the heartiest sympathy; and earnest men, for
whose earnest purpose I have the heartiest respect ; but
as there are methods and agencies which are used in our
day by Christian people which throng streets and public
halls with some jesting rabble following a brass band,
and men and women tawdrily or grotesquely clad, to be
the sport of lookers-on, so the Church is in danger, I
sometimes fear, of a zeal to attract, rather than to edify,
and to present herself as pretty and picturesque, rather
than august, grave, and inspiring. Doubtless there are
"many men and many minds," and the Catholic Church
must be as universal in her methods and agencies as
she claims to be in her mission and character. But
methods, after all, are only secondary to that loving
and self-forgetting spirit which using, as surely we may
well remember in this venerable sanctuary, not yet
spoiled by the iconoclastic spirit of a modernism which
would leave nothing venerable unchanged, — which
using, I say, only older and well-tried methods, has,

302 Wapyiarks.

nevertheless, wrought in all ages of the Church's his-
tory the mightiest miracles of love and healing.

Ours is indeed a new era, and we may not put the
new wine into old bottles, — we may not, in other
words, always insist upon forcing this or that particu-
lar movement into superannuated and outworn forms
of activity or expression. But, in one sense, and that
the deepest, the problems of our generation are not new
but old, — as old as sin and selfishness, as old as
human waywardness and depravity and guilt. And,
whether it be the frictions and mutual enmities of those
in different walks of life, or the misery and shame that
are the consequence of a disregard of the laws of God,
what we want is not so much a new departure in methods
as a new baptism of the old, and yet ever renewing
spirit. And so, the power which is to keep the Church,
its episcopate, its clergy, its people, in touch with the
present is the power of that divine sympathy and self-
abnegation which shone, above all other graces, in the
person and work of Jesus Christ. "And when they
had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them,
they sent them away." Ah! it was not for nothing,
we may be sure, that just that precise form of commis-
sion and empowering was ordained for the observance
of the infant Church of God, and those who should bear
rule in it, for all ages. Those pierced hands, " which
were nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross," and
which, as Jean Paul wrote, "have turned the gates of
centuries on their hinges, — what unceasing translation
of the heart of God was wrought by their never-resting

The Calling of the Episcopate. 303

touch, of healing and of life-giving power, all the way
from the blessing of little children, the opening of
blind eyes, cleansing of leprous bodies, the raising of
the dead, — till they were outstretched in benediction
above adoring disciples as He whose they were was
parted from His flock, " and a cloud received Him out
of their sight ! " Most happy, verily, is that appoint-
ment of this day, the feast of Saint Luke the beloved
physician, for a service which binds that laying on of
hands to which soon we shall proceed with the healing
and healthful work of Christ's first Apostles. We may
preach, and teach, and admonish, and exhort as we
please, — but until somehow we are turning words into
work, and entreaty into helpful and outreaching service,
we shall preach in vain. That declamatory and reac-
tionary instinct in human nature which, in the presence
of moral and social evils, spends itself in vehemence of
denunciations and revolutionary proclamations of war-
fare upon all existing social order, is simply a bald
impertinence until it is supplemented by some effort
to lighten the burdens and readjust the inequalities
which, ofttimes, the noisiest reformers "will not so
much as touch with one of their fingers." The in-
tellectual discontent, the impatience of creeds and
symbols, the disposition to challenge the stern and
righteous teachings of God's Holy Word, the agrarian-
ism of the proletariat, and the savage animosity of an-
archical teachers and their disciples, — these come, as
often as otherwise, from a frigid and distant temper in
those who stand over against them, a temper which is

304 Waymarks.

too indolent and too selfish to make the Catholic faith
a living reality to men by the swift and loving eager-
ness with which it is not only taught but lived.

And all this touches the office and ministry which
we are to-day to commit to this our brother-elect, in a
very close and living way. The office of ruling and
guidance and oversight to which he is now to be set
apart, can never be separated from that other of ordain-
ing and confirming, in which he is to be the channel,
under God's blessing, of those divine and enabling gifts
which are for the strengthening of souls, and so, for the
healing of the nations. In other words, his work of
oversight, of episcopizing, can never be separated from
that other work which keeps him ever, in a most real
and literal way, in touch with, close to, and not aloof
from, the flock which he is to feed and guide. At this
point there recur to me some words which are surely,
on this day and in connection Avith this service, of pre-
eminent pathos and appropriateness. In the volume
entitled "The Dignity of Man," published after his
death by his daughter, the late Bishop of Michigan, in
this precise connection, speaks at length on this
point : —

'^It is perfectly obvious that when Jesus, in Saint John's
Gospel, described Himself as the Shepherd who entereth in
by the door, He was not discussing the question of the
credentials of authority, or of the formal commission of
shepherdhood ; but was pointing out the only way in which
shepherdhood of any kind can discharge its function, and
realize its power. He was propounding a lesson which

The Calling of the Episcopate. 305

it behooves all meu to ponder well who hope to influence
their fellow-men for good. Eank, office, order, culture,
property, — be the authority, the privilege, the right of
these what they may, the eternal law of God, as exemplified
in the life of His Son, and taught in His Holy Word, and
illustrated in human history, is this : that none of these, no
matter how commissioned or sent, can exercise any real
shepherdhood over men except as they are in sympathy with
them. This is true in Church and State ; of the employers
of labor; of the heads of households; of civil rulers and
political leaders ; of bishops, priests and deacons, — the
power to lead men lies in sympathizing with them and walk-
ing in the same way with them. * He that entereth in by the
door is the shepherd of the sheep.' Saying this, the great
Master spoke not merely as a moralist and sage, but also as a
statesman. He propounded a new principle in social and
political economy which princes and diplomatists have
hardly yet grown up to the grandeur of, though the
vicissitudes of falling thrones and changing dynasties have
been confirming it for thousands of years. For man has
always been prone to think that eminence of gifts or station
would give him power; that pomp, or wealth, or place,
would enable him to exercise dominion. But Jesus utterly
reversed all this when He said, ' Whosoever will be great
among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be
chief among you, let him be your servant : even as the Son
of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and
.to give His life a ransom for many.' Saying this He did
not repudiate distinction of order, but rather pointed out the
eternal purpose for which it is ordained. He did not
renounce authority, but rather pointed out the only way
to vindicate and exercise it. For He said in another place :
'Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so
I am. ' But because I am your Lord and Master, I am come
among you as one that serveth. So here He taught the

20

306 Waymarks.

same great lesson. The man of influence is the man of
sympathy 5 the man of power is the man of service. The
shej)herd enters in by the sheep's door; he leads them in and
ouf and finds pasture for them. He knows them, and calls
them by name. They know his voice, and w ill come when
he calls them. He that walks with the sheep is the
shepherd of the sheep."

You at any rate, my dear brother, will not misunder-
stand or blame if I recall these words to-day. There
are some of us here this morning who, like those
Hebrews at the rebuilding of the Temple, cannot quite
part the joy of this happy and auspicious hour from
tearful memories of one whose place you are fitly to
fill, and whose noble episcopate, all too soon ended as
it seems to us, you are to-day to take up. You, who
knew and honored him, will not misconstrue us if,
seeking for a word most apt and fitting for this hour,
we borrow his. And verily you need not. That single
and blameless ministry, so unobtrusive, so untiring, so
wise and tender and helpful, which for so many years
you have exercised in this parish, is the best witness
that, in taking up the larger and more difficult tasks
which are before you, you do not now need to begin to
learn to keep yourself in touch with the past, and also
with the present. The cure and charge in which so long
and faithfully you have labored, is one endeared to
Churchmen, and not alone in this diocese but all over
the land. The cure of White and Kemper, De Lancey
and Odenheimer, — it is associated in the mind of him
w^ho is your preacher with one whose name he bears.

The Calling of the Episcopate. 307

and who, coming here now nearly seventy years ago to
receive at the hands of William White both baptism
and ordination, returned after many days to minister
in this diocese as its Bishop for nearly twenty years.
It is thus that the consecrated memories of the past
and the hallowed affections of the present assemble
here to speak to you, Salve^ vale, — Hail, and farewell !
It is thus that the Church of other and feebler days
joins in sending you forth to what was then untrodden
ground, and now has grown to be one of her foremost
and noblest dioceses. Believe me, that in going there
you will have the welcome of warm and loyal hearts
and the support of strong and generous hands. And
believe me too, that in Avelcoming you to this office to-
day, we who do so are glad and thankful that the Provi-
dence of God, wiser than our poor judgments, has
seemed to disappoint us for a time, only to give us to-
day, in the successor of that great Bishop of Michigan
who went so lately to his rest, one who, in the judg-
ment of the whole Church, is pre-eminently worthy to
succeed him. The various training which as teacher,
pastor, and priest you have had, will find no unworthy
field in the diocese to which you go, and that earlier
identity with studies pre-eminently identified with
God's ancient people is one among many guarantees
that you will both keep yourself in touch with a venera-
ble and historic past as well as with a living and ex-
acting present.

I know what ties you sever to-day, and 1 should sadly
abuse my opportunity if I said one word, even though

308 Waymarks.

it might be of well-meant sympathy, to open that
wound, and so make the parting harder and the wrench
more bitter. You are called to-day to make an offering
of yourself to God; and this your flock is called to give
its best for Him, in giving you.

May God who has called you, as we are most cer-
tainly persuaded, strengthen you, and comfort them;
and may the Master whom you hear to-day, bidding
you go forth to take this yoke of higher ministry upon
you, walk beside you all the way, making that yoke an
easy yoke, and this, your heaviest burden, light!

FREE CHURCHES.

N"o review of ecclesiastical life in the United States would be
complete which did not recognize the considerable change
which has taken place during the last twenty years in the
matter of free churches. It cannot, indeed, be said that that
change has greatly affected the convictions of a large and in-
telligent constituency, whose attitude toward free churches
has in some cases changed only from one of languid indiffer-
ence to one of distinct and sincere hostility. With these the
free-church movement is associated with certain elements of
unreality, if not of phariseeism, — which latter, it must
frankly be owned, is sometimes apparently, if not really,
present in the extravagant language of its advocates. It is
one thing to say, as it would seem might justly be said, that
the principle of a free and open house of worship, where all
men, of whatever rank and condition, are equally welcome,
is the right principle in worship, and quite another to say
that those who tolerate or have a part in any other system
are guilty of a deliberate denial of the first principles of
Christianity. There is unquestionably room for an honest
difference of opinion in regard to a movement which is en-
compassed with many serious practical difficulties, and which
— to some, at any rate — seems to lose almost as much in
one direction as it gains in another.

It may be said, for instance, as an objection to the free-
church system, that it exhausts, if not the energies, at least
the interest, of a congregation in the maintenance of public
worship, and that when provision for this has been made,
most free-church congregations do little or nothing for the

310 Waymarks.

work of the church beyond their own walls. It may be said,
again, that the system assists the evasion of just responsi-
bility" for the maintenance of public worship, by leaving it so
entirely to voluntary offerings as to bind upon no one a pre-
cise and definite obligation. It may be said, yet again, that
it devolves upon the clergy a vulgar and anxious concern in
regard to the pecuniary interests of a parish, which is at
once disheartening and secularizing. Still further, it may
be said that the actual working of a system which denies
fixed and reserved places in the church edifice to all alike is
injurious to the solidarity of the family, which is scattered
and disintegrated, as so many isolated individuals, on all occa-
sions of public worship. And, finally, it is sometimes urged
that in practice the system is often no better than the pew
system, since it not unfrequently concedes arbitrarilj^ to
favored persons what it affects to deny to all, and this upon
no accepted basis of ^' first come, first served" or ^'best pay,
best seat," either of which principles has at least the merit
of some kind of equity.

But when all these objections have been urged, there re-
mains a profound conviction of which it is sufficient to saj^,
by way of preface to the two discourses which follow, that its
fruits demonstrate it to be a steadily growing conviction.
At the beginning of the second half of the present century
free churches were, in the communion for which the writer
is permitted to speak, so rare as to be almost phenomenal.
Within the last quarter of a century they have become so
numerous that in some dioceses there are no others, while in
others they are the rule rather than the exception. As was
to be expected, they most widely prevail where social dis-
tinctions and those created by wealth are least marked; while,
on the other hand, in great cities they make way against
both these hostile influences but slowly; and yet in these,
and conspicuously in one or two instances in the Diocese of
New York, they have achieved a success which is most of all

Free Churches, 311

precious because it betokens the breaking down of prejudices
which are most likely to be fatal to the progress of the
Church and her divine message among those whose sor-
rows and burdens make most pathetic claim for her divine
consolations.

The first of the sermons following was preached at the con-
secration of Grace Chapel, New York, on Sept. 25, 1876, and
the second in the Church of the Holy Apostles, Philadelphia,
on the occasion of the anniversary of the Free-Church Asso-
ciation, May 17, 1877.

XVIII.

A CONSECRATION SERMON.

The rich and poor meet together ; the Lord is the maker of
them all. — Proverbs xxii. 2.

Over the chancel arch of the building which formerly
stood a little to the northward of the spot upon which
we are assembled this morning, and which was de-
stroyed by fire on the eve of Christmas Day, 1872, ran
the legend which I have chosen as my text. The words
were a proclamation of the motive by which those who
had reared that building were inspired, and a declara-
tion of those principles of worship by which they aimed
to be governed.

The first Grace Chapel was reared in the year 1849,
and it is at once interesting and instructive to trace
the history of its inception. When the present struc-
ture, known as Grace Church, in Broadway, was con-
secrated just thirty years ago, its rector, the Rev. Dr.
Thomas House Taylor, D.D., in the sermon preached at
its consecration, spoke as follows : " I would seize upon
this occasion of joyous congratulation to lead you on
from one good and glorious work to another, perhaps
more really good, perhaps more truly glorious still.

A Consecration Sermon. 313

You have indeed provided for yourselves, and for the
deathless spirits of your little ones, this place of prayer
in all its soothing and subduing associations of solem-
nity and beauty ; and now I have come to persuade you
to go on and provide for the spiritual and eternal wants
of the poor, whom God has commanded to be always
with you.

" My (ibject is to ask that you will give me the means
of building and preparing for the most efficient and
most immediate operation, Grace Church Chapel, a
church in which the Word and sacraments shall be
administered, and in which the sittings shall always
be free to all who will use them for their souls' good."

The answer to this appeal was not a great while in
taking visible form, and becoming a most successful
reality.

A free chapel was reared upon the corner of Madison
Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, and was intrusted
first to the care of the Rev. Edwin Harwood, and after-
ward to that of the Rev. Henry E. Montgomery, whose
laborious and successful ministry in this community is
still a fragrant memory in the homes of many Church-
men among us. In the year 1856 the congregation
worshipping in that chapel organized itself into an in-
dependent parish, thenceforward known as the Church
of the Incarnation, which now, in turn, maintains its
own free chapel (once ministered to by him who to-day
assumes the charge of this), and soon after, Grace
Church proceeded to the erection of another and much
more spacious chapel hard by this present site.

314 Waymarks,

The second Grace Chapel, with as large a number of
sittings as the parent church, was speedily completed,
and opened under the most successful ministry of the
Rev. Robert George Dixon. That ministry verified the
language of the text, as nearly as it has ever been veri-
fied in the history of the Church in this city. The con-
gregation which Mr. Dixon gathered about him was one
drawn exclusively from no one class or coiidition of
life, but included both rich and poor, the man of sub-
stance and the day laborer, the woman of leisure and
the woman who won her maintenance at the point of
her needle.

Thus far Grace Chapel certainly realized its original
design, and turned into honest reality the words of that
legend which adorned it. But it was not a great many
years before it was found that the building, though
cost and pains had not been spared in rearing it, was
but ill-adapted for the uses of free church or indeed,
any church work, and was wholly wanting in those
manifold conveniences, which the growth of church
life among us have made indispensable to the manifold
forms of parochial activity. In the construction of the
building everything had been sacrificed to a large au-
ditorium. There was no provision for parochial and
other societies, and even the accommodations of the
Sunday-school, which were provided in the recesses of
a damp and dark basement, were such as to discourage
those most interested in its prosperity. The young
men and women of the parent church who offered their
services as teachers found that their catechetical func-

A Consecration Sermon. 315

tions had to be exercised amid surroundings that
recalled the catacombs, and in an atmosphere which
seemed likely, to sensitive constitutions, to threaten
the re-enacting of the primitive martyrdoms. In a
word, beyond the not altogether convenient arrange-
ments of the main assemblage-room itself, much about
the building was calculated rather to hinder than to
foster growth and prosperity.

When, therefore, the edifice was destroyed by fire,
the first resolve of those upon whom fell the burden of
its reconstruction was the resolve that the new Grace
Chapel should be a structure fully abreast of the de-
mands of church life and church work in this age and
in this city.

The result of that resolution salutes us in these our
surroundings this morning. As we have placed the
font at the threshold of this chapel, in token that bap-
tism is the door and gateway into the fellowship of the
Church of God, so have we placed Grace Hall, the
building through which we have passed on our way
hither, at the threshold of Grace Chapel, in token that
the Church's godly training and nurture is the thresh-
old of those sacraments and ordinances which she
offers for the strengthening and refreshing of more
adult life. We have felt that this work of teaching
and training was not to be thrust underground or done
in a corner. We have felt that, amid all the competi-
tions of that secular education which is going on about
us, it demanded the best appliances and the most gen-
erous provision of every suitable, tasteful, and approved

316 Waymarks.

help. We have felt that those, too, who were willing
to labor, to plan, and to contrive for the bettering of
poor children, for the relief of the sick, for the succor
of the neglected and destitute, — to do, in a word, the
work which has been done for the past eight years by
the various societies connected with this parish, — were
entitled to every convenience and accommodation which
their blessed work demanded. And feeling this, we
have aimed, in the building which immediately adjoins
this, to provide such appliances and conveniences, ac-
cording to the best models, and in ample and generous
measure.

And so, too, in this chapel itself. It has been felt
by those who have reared it that a free church ought to
be no less costly or spacious, or richly adorned, than
if it were designed for the use of those who, through an
ownership of the sittings, are supposed to acquire a
certain right of property in the house of God. It would
have been easy, when the former edifice was destroyed
by fire, to have parted with its site at a very considera-
ble advance upon the original cost, and to have erected
in a less expensive neighborhood a much cheaper struc-
ture. But it was felt that this would be an economy
too dearly purchased; and instead, therefore, of any
diminution of outlay there has been a considerable in-
crease. Additional land has been acquired, the service
of skilled architects and superior mechanics has been
secured, and the whole work, which has involved an
expenditure of nearly |100,000, has been done with the
very best materials, and with a constant reference to

A Consecration Sermon. 317

honesty, thoroughness, and beauty of result. Whatever
else may be said of this building, it may safely be said
that we offer to God this morning nothing that is
cheap or mean or inferior. This edifice, placed as it is
at one of the most central and commanding points in
this great city, may safely challenge comparison with
any others which have lately been reared in the
diocese.

Yes, this much we may say, and saying it must needs
regret that we can say no more. If there has been, to
any ear, a sound of boastfulness in what has thus far
been uttered, I venture to predict that before I have
done you will own that I have approached these services
and this duty in a very different spirit. It is a duty
from which I would gladly have been excused, and from
which I had hoped to have been relieved. But having
been bidden to it by a voice which I may not disregard,
I have no option but to speak of our enterprise of this
mornins:, and of its relations to the work of the Church
in this community, and among our American people, in
terms at once honest, explicit, and unreserved.

Let me say, then, at the outset, that the erection of
free chapels, in connection with parish churches which
are not free, is a part of our modern and American sys-
tem of expedients. I shall not undertake this morning
to trace the rise and growth of what is called the pew
system beyond our own shores, or to explain its origin
amid other surroundings. It is enough to say that in
England, where it has been known for many genera-
tions, and where some of its worst abuses have ripened

318 Waymarks.

to maturity, it has always existed w«ith qualifications
largely unknown among ourselves, and that to-day, in
the Church of England, it is as verily a decaying and
vanishing usage as is the use of the whipping-post, or
the imprisonment of men for debt. Unfortunately,
however, this cannot be said of it in the United States,
where the tendency, if it is marked enough to be de-
tected in any particular direction, is in the direction of
the wider prevalence of the pewed system. I know
that this is not the case in our own Church where (as I
believe is true in Minnesota) there are whole dioceses
where there is scarcely a church or chapel which is not
free. But in communions outside the Church, as
amoug the Methodists, the pew system has certainly
gained ground in cities, while, at the other ecclesiasti-
cal extreme, the churches of the Roman obedience
have, many of them, pews which are let and sub-let to
two or three series of tenants.

And among ourselves, while there has been progress,
that progress has not been rapid, and the growth of a
sounder sentiment in the Church at large has, on the
whole, been painfully slow. As it should be in all
great reforms, the clergy have been in the advance,
and too much honor cannot be given to men who have
committed themselves to the free-church movement
with a noble disregard of every personal consideration
of comfort or security. But the clergy have not been
largely followed by the laity ; nor is it, perhaps, greatly
surprising. The success of the free-church movement
in England has been achieved, it should be remem-

A Consecration Sermon. 319

bered, under different conditions and amid very differ-
ent surroundings from our own. English societ}^ is a
society substantially of fixed classes and of sharply
defined social lines. Men hold their place in it mainly
by virtue of hereditary considerations quite outside of
any purchased precedence in the house of God. In-
deed, so firmly fixed are those lines, and so potent in
separating classes, that when men come to the house of
God they are anxious — the loftiest often even more
than the lowliest — to forget and obliterate those lines
by every means in their power. A friend of mine,
visiting a crowded church in the East End of Lon-
don, which is the Five Points neighborhood of that
great city, reached over the shoulder of one near him
in the throng which gathered in its porch, and in ac-
cordance with a vicious custom not yet wholly extinct
in England, dropped a shilling in the hand of some one
whom he had observed with his back to him busily
seating strangers. The supposed verger turned at once
and faced him, and he recognized in him one of the
first noblemen in England. In other words, a man of
high rank came to the services mainly that he might
forget his rank, and busy himself as the servant of the
lowliest stranger that sought entrance there.

But with us, the condition of things is very different.
In America there are no fixed classes, but there is, in
every generation, a large class who are struggling for
social precedence, and who are willing to buy it at any
cost. And for this class the pew system seems to have
been especially contrived. To buy a place in a con-

320 Waymarhs.

spicuous church, and have that place, itself, as
conspicuous as may be, this is a title to a certain
recognition which, however hazy and indefinite it may
be when you undertake to analyze it, is not indefinite
in its actual results. And so it comes to pass that
many churches are composed almost exclusively of
persons of one class, or, at any rate, of those of ample
means, if not of great wealth. I may not pause here
to ask how such churches manage to read and to hear
some passages in the Epistle General of Saint James, and
I know it may be answered that, even in such churches,
there is abundant hospitality to strangers, and that that
hospitality is exercised generously and unmurmuringly
from one year's end to another. I presume there are
many churches in New York in which there are no free
sittings, and yet in which, as in that to which it is my
own privilege to minister, the strangers who are wel-
comed to its pews on any given Sunday may be counted
by hundreds. But I am speaking of the general work-
ing of a system, and as to the results of that system, it
seems to me no candid mind can really be in doubt. I
was conversing, not long ago, with a singularly intelli-
gent layman, resident in a neighboring city, whose
statements, volunteered without a single leading ques-
tion, or indeed an observation of any sort on my own
part, were certainly worthy of note. Himself a Church-
man, though nurtured a Unitarian, he had enjoyed ex-
ceptional opportunities for observing the history and
progress of congregations of the most various and di-
verse creeds and traditions. As the result of such ob-

A Consecration Sermon. 321

servation he stated as his belief that at the present ratio
of decrease, the most stately and costly church edifices
in the city of his own residence would be within the
next twenty-five years virtually empty of worshippers.
Crowded together as they had been during the past ten
years in a district where land was most costly, and where
were to be found only the residences of the wealthy, the
region had come to be described with a significant sar-
casm as the "Holy Land." But no pilgrimages were
made to it from other and less favored regions. The
churches were filled, or rather barely half-filled, with
representatives from the classes living immediately
about them. The charges for sittings, and, more than
all, the general atmosphere of these churches excluded
absolutely all persons who labored with their own
hands for their living, and scarcely less those of
limited means who form that vast middle class which,
as it is the most numerous among us, so is it the most
powerful in all great religious and social movements.
It was the conviction of this witness that, unless the
present pew system was abandoned, many of these
churches would, themselves, have to be abandoned ; and
he instanced the case of one costly and splendid edi-
fice, lately erected, which has already been closed,
partly, it is true, because it has proved to be almost
impossible to conduct public services within it so as to
make those services intelligible; but also because there
was really no congregation to occupy or to sustain it.
In other words, it was his conviction that what is
known as the pew system was rapidly contributing, in

21

^22 Wai/marks.

that community at any rate, to the steady decline, if
not to the absolute abandonment of all habit of attend-
ance upon public worship by large masses of people.

I am aware that in New England (and it is of a New
England city that I have been speaking) there are other
causes which may be alleged as having been more or
less operative in producing such results. But it is not
possible wholly to account for these results by attribut-
ing them to the growth of unbelief, or to an increasing
indifference to religious sanctions. There has been as
much, if not more, of both these in England, during
the last twenty-five years, as there has been among
ourselves. Indeed the teachings which have been sup-
posed to produce such results have emanated from
English cities and English universities, rather than
from our own. But, during that time, it is idle to deny
that, especially in the Church of England itself, there
has been a marked, in many cases a vast, increase in
the number of public services, and in the numbers of
those who are in attendance upon them. And it is
equally idle to deny that that increase has been syn-
chronous with the growth of free churches, and with
the partial or complete removal of the restrictions
upon the use of the sittings at certain specified ser-
vices in others that are not free.

These facts, I take it, speak for themselves. If
they have any meaning at all, they mean that our
present system of pewed churches is a mistake, and
that, if it had any seeming warrant in the exigencies of
other days, it must sooner or later give way before the

A Consecration Sermon. 323

graver, — may I not truly say ? — the sterner exigencies
of our own. I know that there are many pewed
churches among us that are still thronged and pros-
perous. If, for instance, I were content not to look
beyond the walls of the edifice in which I myself min-
ister, I might easily dismiss all anxiety for the welfare
of the Church at large. But a few churches occupying
a central position, and with means and ample accom-
modations, are no criterion of the vast majority that
are otherwise circumstanced.

And the misfortune with these, as indeed with all
pewed churches, is that they work to the disadvantage
of the Church at large in two ways. In the first place,
as I have indicated, they tend to exclusion, and to the
perpetuation, in the last place on earth in which it
ought to be known, of a spirit of caste, and in the sec-
ond place, they act injuriously upon the growth and
prosperity of all free churches around them. It is
fundamental to the well-being of any congregation that
it should include within its worshippers all sorts and
conditions of men. But this will never largely come
to pass, — it is well to face the situation frankly, —
this will never largely come to pass while it is possi-
ble for certain classes to pass by the doors of a free
church for another in which they can purchase certain
privileges — a certain pre-eminence — by a certain
money expenditure. So long as this continues, free
churches as a whole will languish, struggling for ex-
istence, or else depending for their maintenance upon
those who are without.

324 Wayraarks.

And so, while I believe that we have done here the
best that could be done under the present circum-
stances, I cannot flatter myself that such temporary
expedients are in the line of the Church's highest
ideal. We have done well in that we have not reared
this edifice in an obscure neighborhood, of mean pro-
portions, or of cheap materials. But the Church of
our affections will do better, nay, best, when it resolves
that instead of pewed churches supplementing them-
selves with free chapels all churches shall be free, and
when, in God's house at any rate, the sound of buying
and selling, of hiring and leasing, shall be forever
silenced.

I know well that, in the way of such a reform, the
obstacles are many and serious. There is the preju-
dice of life-long habit and training, there are the rights
of property, there are the very practical questions of
maintenance and support.

To overcome these difficulties and to solve such prob-
lems will be the work not of a day nor of a year. No
great revolution — and surely this involves a great
revolution — was ever successfully accomplished save
through the gradual education of the popular mind;
and the advocates of free churches have sometimes
alienated as much sympathy and support by their acri-
monious impatience as they have won by their single
and self-sacrificing devotion.

But meantime the movement is destined to grow and
spread, and ours it is, especially, who are not formally
identified with it, to help and not to hinder it. It has

A Consecration Sermon. 325

been my own habit to preach a sermon annually in the
parish church of which I am rector, in behalf of this
free chapel, and I have been accustomed, on such occa-
sions, to present some of the arguments for the univer-
sal adoption of the principle of free churches. Of
course, the adoption of that principle, when the time
shall be ripe for it, will involve something of friction,
and something more of collision with wonted tradi-
tions; but, by the abandonment of pews (themselves
one of the most questionable features of both pewed and
free churches alike, as they exist among us), by the
adoption of chairs in their stead, by the multiplication
of services at such hours as shall meet the convenience
of different classes of persons, and, above all, by the
strenuous inculcation of the Apostolic doctrine in this
matter, a sounder sentiment and practice will come to
prevail, while individual rights will be preserved, and
individual wants will be adequately provided for.

Toward this end, it is my earnest prayer that the
building which we give to-day to God may be a whole-
some and helpful contribution. Under the charge of
him who has been called to be its minister, and who
has elsewhere made of a free church so thoroughly
prosperous and successful an enterprise, I venture to
believe that we may look for results worthy of his past
record, and of the opportunity which is here presented
to him. For one, I shall rejoice to learn from his ex-
ample how much better and more fruitful than any
other is that system which makes a church free and
open to all sorts and conditions of men, and which

326 Waymarhs,

recognizes no rights of property within its walls save
His whose, by Divine right, is most of all the holy
house which is hallowed to His worship and honor,
even as it is called by His holy name!

May He accept, then, the gift which we lay at His
feet to-day ; and may He inspire us all, ministers and
people alike, with a deeper and heartier desire to see
and recognize our duty to His cause and kingdom in the
world, and seeing and owning it, gladly to surrender
every prejudice, every prepossession, every selfish in-
terest that may stand in the way of the doing of it !

XIX.

THE FREE CHURCH A WITNESS TO THE
BROTHERHOOD OF HUMANITY.

For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have
2)ut on Christ. There is neither Jeiv nor Greek, there is
neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female:
for ye are all one in Christ. — Galatians iii. 27, 28.

A NEWSPAPER in this city, referring, the other day, to
this Annual ]\Ieeting of the Free-Church Association,
kindly heralded your preacher to the confidence and
respect of those who were to listen to him, by informing
the public that he ministered to the most exclusive con-
gregation, who themselves worshipped in the most ex-
pensive pews, to be found in any church in all the
land.

If a cono^reo-ation which cheerfullv welcomes strano'ers
by hundreds to a share in its sittings on every Lord's
day through all the year, a congregation in which single
sittings may be had for eight dollars a year and a pew
for twenty-five dollars, and in which the average cost of
each Sunday service to each sitting in the church, is ten
cents per service, — is open to so sweeping a charge as I
have referred to, then, certainlv, the indictment with

328 Way marks.

which he who speaks to you to-night has been welcomed
to this place is true, — then, and not otherwise.

I have referred to it, however, not because such a
statement is of sufficient importance to merit a serious
disclaimer, but becattse, after all, though so ingeniously
erroneous in fact, it is so eminently suggestive of the
conviction which lies behind it. That is to say, it may be
easy to prove in any particular instance that churches
or congregations charged with being exclusive are not
exclusive, — that certain traditions of exclusiveness that
linger about them have long ago been banished by a
decenter and more Christian practice, — it may be easy
to prove that in this or that church the clergy have
laid down certain rules as to the hospitality to be ex-
ercised to strangers of whatever rank and in whatever
garb, and that they resolutely maintain the observance
of such rules. But all this, a little reflection must show
one, does not really touch the root of the matter. That
involves the question, On what terms is a worshipper to
be admitted to God's house ? Is he to be admitted
there upon sufferance as the tolerated guest of some
other fellow-being, who owns in that holy place an ex-
clusive right to the occupancy of so many square feet
and so many pounds of hair pillows, or as a fellow-citi-
zen of the household of God, in that Divine Republic
in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, Brahmin nor
Pariah, bond nor free, superior sex nor inferior sex
(or, as the Apostle puts it, male nor female), but where
men are all one in Christ ?

In other words, such a statement as I have referred

The Free Church A Witness. 329

to is significant, whatever may have been the motive
that in any particular instance has happened to inspire
it, because it is the indication of a popular conviction ;
and that conviction is, the inconsistency of all pewed
churches, however hospitable their welcome or inexpen-
sive their accommodations, with the Church's doctrines
and her Master's teachings.

For no man can read those teachings without straight-
way seeing that they are at war, distinctly and unequivo-
cally with the spirit of caste, of exclusiveness, of mutual
suspicion or contempt. Coming in, as it did, upon a condi-
tion of imperial despotism on the one hand, and of cring-
ing servitude on the other, the religion of the New Testa-
ment sets to work straightway to teach the world the
blessed evangel of the brotherhood of humanity in the
liberating and ennobling bond of a common Saviour and
Redeemer. It preaches no communism ; it denounces
no existing government ; it undertakes to overthrow or
undermine no political fabric. " Honor all men ; love
the brotherhood ; fear God ; honor the king." This is
the four-fold legend with which it flings its blood-dyed
banner to the wind. " Servants, obey your masters.
Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar's. Custom to whom custom ; honor to whom
honor ; fear to whom fear. Art thou called, being a
servant ? Care not for it. . . . For he that is called in
the Lord, being a servant, is Christ's free man." In
other words, Christianity assailed no existing social in-
stitutions from without; but it wrought from within,
sanctifying and ennobling individual character. It rec-

330 Waymarks.

ognized, what you and I must recognize, that so long-
as human society exists there will exist certain inevi-
table distinctions, which will as inevitably perpetuate
themselves, in spite of every theory and every endeavor,
whether of Fourier or of Brook Farm, to do away w^ith
them. Wealth, mental ability, force of will, the brain
to conceive and the hand to execute, " the genius of ad-
ministration," as some one has called it, — these will
rule the world, and possess themselves of its best things
by virtue of the authority of that earlier revelation
which God has written not in a book but in the brain,
as long as the world stands.

I. But precisely at this point appears the function or
office of the Church of God in the w^orld. What is the
tendency of the growth of wealth, of learning, of power,
in any particular class ? It is inevitably to produce that
thing which we call the spirit of caste, — that sentiment
which in the heart of an oriental becomes at length a
chronic temper of scorn and disgust. In Malabar to-day,
a Nayadi^ or lower caste native, defiles a Brahmin if
he comes within seventy-four paces of him. A Pariah
is so called because formerly he was obliged to wear a
bell so that a Brahmin could be warned of his approach
and thus avoid him. We smile, perhaps, at these follies
of other races, but what are they, after all, but carica-
tures of what exists among ourselves ? What is so
imminent a danger as that, when wealth and refine-
ment and luxury increase among a people, ignorance and
vice and degradation shall increase with them ? And
what has been the result of this growth in opposite

The Free Church A Witness. 831

directions but a development of the spirit of haughty and
heartless indifference on the one hand, and of impa-
tience, envy, and resentment on the other ? " There is a
tendency at work among us," wrote an English man of
business not long ago, " to make the wall of moral
separation between the rich and the poor broader,
higher, and more impassable, until now many of the poor
have so little personal acquaintance or intercourse with
the rich that to many of them the well-dressed neigh-
bors whom they meet in their daily walks hardly seem to
•be their own fellow-beings, with one single passion, trait,
motive, or feeling in common with themselves." Does
any one to whom I speak and who has seen much of life
in our great cities doubt whether or no such a spirit of
social alienation is at work among us ? And is any one
of us in ignorance as to what sooner or later it will pro-
duce ? If so let him read the history of the French Rev-
olution, whether of 1789, or 1848, and he will realize
what bitter and bloody fruit the growth of social aliena-
tion may bring forth.

And for what does the Church of God exist in the
world, if not to resist and rebuke this hateful spirit of
caste ? What is the meaning of her Master's teaching, if
it is not that, whatever inevitable distinctions exist else-
where, inside the household of the common Father, and
in the dear fellowship of the Divine Elder Brother,
they are to be obliterated and forgotten. How of old, in
that flippant Galatian community to which the Apostle
wrote the letter from which I take my text, the grave
Israelite, eaten up with his pride of race, despised the

332 Waymarhs.

laughter-loving Greeks. How the Roman freedman
scorned and insulted the slave over whom at last he had
lifted himself. How everywhere in that old world man-
hood spurned and degraded and enslaved womanhood.
Hearken now how, into the midst of all this seething
strife of caste, comes the great-hearted Apostle to the
Gentiles crying, " There is neither Jew nor Greek, bond
nor free, male nor female ; for ye are all one in Christ."
It is a message which the Church must to-day not
only preach but live. When a few years ago in France
the Commune of Paris murdered its venerable arch-
bishop, of what was that blind and bloody deed the
expression ? Certainly not of personal animosity toward
a pure and blameless prelate of the Roman Catholic
Church, who, according to universal testimony, had
lived an unspotted and exemplary life. No ! but of
resentment toward that thing which called itself re-
ligion, of which, in their eyes, that feeble old man
was the representative, — a thing which baptized itself
with the name of Jesus, and claimed to have come to
teach the world the Master's new command of love,
but which, as they knew it, had strengthened the reign
of caste, had neglected the poor and the outcast, and
had cringed and bowed down to wealth and vulgar
power. And so these men had reasoned, and reasoned
rightly, " If this be religion we want no more of it !
Away with it, and with its lordly and arrogant represen-
tatives ! " Now, then, I have no slightest apprehension
that if we in America perpetuate and foster the pew-
system, any bishop, priest, or deacon will ever enjoy the

The Free Church A Witness. 333

doubtful honors of martyrdom therefor ; but this I do
venture to predict, that if, in this or any other matter,
we continue to lend ourselves to the spirit of caste, we
shall, as a church, sooner or later find ourselves with-
out a flock to feed or souls to guide. Little by little
the spirit of alienation will do its deadening work, and
one day w^e shall wake up to find that in our excessive
anxiety for the heathen in Walnut Street and on Murray
Hill we have lost all hold upon the living heart of that
great human mass which makes up the people.

But at this point it may very justly be asked. How
does all this bear upon the present condition of things
in our ordinary parish churches ? Is it a criminal in-
dictment of the pew-system as it exists, anywhere and
everywhere alike, and of those who maintain or acqui-
esce in it ? Most distinctly, no. A criminal indictment
implies a criminal intention, and in producing that result
which we find in the Church to-day there has been no
criminal intention whatever. The first pews in England,
as Archibald Hale shows in his quaint book, " A series
of Precedents illustrative of the Discipline of the Church
of England," were undoubtedly simple sittings, introduced
for the aged and infirm ; and Hale mentions that " so
late as 1617 it was considered an offence for a young
lady to be seated with her mother." But while in England
the modern pew was the result of the steady encroach-
ments of wealth and class-feeling, their introduction into
our own land was certainly free from any motive of ex-
clusion. From the beginning churches were pewed in
these colonies, and a pew-tax was assessed as the sim-

334 Waymarks,

plest and most obvious method of providing a revenue.
It is true that the pews and the taxes both implied a
double proscription of the poor. They must sit in the
gallery, and they must pay a rental for their pews or be
liable to be turned out of them. But class-distinctions
seemed natural enough to a people who, though they had
renounced their allegiance to a king, were yet trained to
revere rank and to give way to a titled aristocracy. Our
ancestors called themselves Republicans in 1776, but it
was a long time after that before the influences of nurture
under a king and his courtiers ceased to assert them-
selves. Meantime, however, the pew-system, inherited as
it was from our mother Church beyond the seas, became
with us the exponent of an entirely different feeling.
In England, a nobleman's pew stood for the precedence
of rank, — a precedence often won by heroic deeds and
a long line of distinguished ancestry. With us it has
come to stand simply for wealth, — however acquired
and however used. The best pew is for the man who
will pay the best price for it ; and so, to the common
mind, the Church seems to be saying that, not eminent
services, not saintly living, not age nor worth shall have
foremost place and utmost honor, but simply he who, by
whatever means, has acquired the most money. This is
the point to which the Church has come, not of delib-
erate purpose, but by a process of unconscious drifting.
It is not that the Church has created the pew-system to
perpetuate castes and to exclude the poor, it is that
others have taken advantage of a system already in ex<
istence to use it for selfish and worldly ends. But

The Free Church A Witness. 335

while these facts exonerate the Church from any worldly
or unchristian or exclusive design, and therefore from
any criminal intent, it does not excuse it from responsi-
bility for that which though not a crime is an evil, — an
evil which has grown up within the Church's very walls,
and whose proportions and influences are now such that
it must be resolutely and courageously dealt with.

II. And this opens the way for the further question,
How are we to deal with this evil V To that question, I
would answer, in the first place, Not, certainly, by hurling
denunciations. Much has been written and said about
the clergy who minister and the people who worship in
pewed churches, to provoke contempt from the one and
resentment from the other. When a clergyman is called
to the cure of souls in a pewed church which he neither
built nor planned and for whose internal financial regu-
lations he has had no slightest responsibility, it will not
help to enlist him in efforts toward the introduction of
a better system than the pewed system — it will not en-
courage him to efforts for reform - — to insinuate that he
is maintaining an evil (which often he is quite powerless
to remedy) merely in his own selfish interests. No man
honors those faithful and self-denying men who have
identified themselves with the free-church movement
more than I do ; but they have not strengthened their
cause nor commended it to others by the readiness with
which some of them have been willing to liint that their
brethren in pewed churches were more concerned about
a comfortable maintenance than for the honor of God
and for the salvation of souls. Do those who speak

336 Wayrnarks.

bitter words about pewed churches and about the pew
system understand that, in cities at any rate, pews are
often valuable pieces of property, and that the bald pro-
position absolutely to surrender them would be greeted in
most cases, at first, simply with good-natured ridicule ?
Do they know that such property has often been inherited
from generation to generation, and that a proposal to
surrender it to common use sounds, to many persons,
like a proposition to convert the family burial-place into
a part of the public highway. I believe it is true that
the venerable corporation of Trinity Church, New York,
has for years been endeavoring to acquire, either by gift
or purchase, a title to its pews so as to make the sittings
in that noble edifice as free in name as they are in fact.
But it has been found that such a proposition is met,
even by those who have long ceased to worship in those
pews, very much as one would greet a scheme for paving
the streets with the family tombstones. Now, then,
pray do not let us waste our breath by denouncing such
a feeling as irrational, as puerile, as a mere prejudice.
Of course it is a mere prejudice. But you cannot drive
the plough-share of revolution through cherished and
inherited prejudices without turning up something else
ihan a kindly soil in which to sow the seeds of reform.
Wrongs must sometimes be righted by revolution, but
evils will be corrected just so fast as, and no faster than,
you can enlighten and educate any prejudiced mass of
people to a clearer vision of the truth.

111. And this leads me to speak, finally, of those obsta-
cles which such education and enlightenment must set

The Free Church A Witness. 337

itself to remove. One of these I have already indicated
as that right of property which so many persons have been
led to entertain and even sacredly to cherish in connec-
tion with the possession of a pew. Another is —

(a) That reluctance to submit one's self to personal
discomfort which is undoubtedly a powerful factor in the
sum total of the ordinary hostility to the pew system.
Now it is the fashion to denounce this feeling as utterly
unworthy of any one who professes and calls himself a
Christian ; and I have heard a clergyman, when it had
been mildly intimated that cleanly habits and personal
neatness were not unworthy of being considered in a
congregation where every one had equal rights, unctu-
ously rebuke such a suggestion with the remark that
" God did not look to see whether people were clean or
dirty when they came into His house, and that we ought
to be glad to get them there upon any terms." To be
sure, the assumption as to what God cares for, especially
in view of what an inspired Apostle has to say in this
connection about having our bodies washed with pure
water, is a somewhat bold one ; but the real value of such
a remark becomes chiefly apparent the moment you con-
sider the standpoint from which it is made. The bishop
sits in his throne (I believe we call them thrones now-a-
days), and the priest sits in his stall, or chair, and the
deacon sits in his chair. As an officiating clergyman 1
never sat in a pew in my life, save in a church in New
England, where there was a preacher's pew in which the
preacher sat, and in which no one else might ever, under
any possible circumstances, sit with him. In a word, no

22

338 Waymarks.

one ever crowds the bishop or the presbyter or the
deacon. Their rights of sitting are reserved. Their
class-privileges are sacredly guarded, and the encroach-
ments of some portlier neighbor upon their twenty-two
inches of pew-room never makes it necessary for them to
cry, with a new sense of the Prophet's meaning, " Oh, my
leanness ! my leanness ! " And therefore one cannot
help feeling that there is a little bit of pharisaism in
that facility with which the clergy urge upon the laity
the unseemliness of objecting because one cannot sit in
a particular seat, or have just so much room in which to
stand or kneel. No one ought to know better than a
clergyman that one cannot worship to edification so
long as some physical discomfort is painfully reminding
him of his body. " I set my face toward the East," says
the author of Eothen somewhere (1 do not undertake
to quote his exact words), " and I travelled on, and on,
and on, until I might come to a race of people that did
not sit in petvs.^^ Suggestive pilgrimage ! which, if not
as religious in its professed object as some others, was
yet, I verily believe, the outcome of a genuine need and
of a devout instinct. It was Daniel Webster who said
that he regarded the survival of Christianity after having
been preached for so many generations in tub-pulpits as
a most signal evidence of its Divine origin. Even so
it must often have occurred to many another to question
whether the survival of tlie instinct of worship amid the
evils and the injustices of pews is not a similar evidence
of the Divine origin of that instinct. If free and open
churches are ever Avidelv to obtain anions; us, I believe
it will be because we have constructed and furnished

The Free Church A Witness. 839

them with chairs instead of pews, and have educated
those who gather in them to that brotherly considera-
tion for others which will strive to free occasions of
close personal proximity from every needless condition
of personal annoyance.

(6) But besides the questions of so-called rights of
property and personal discomfort there is in the popular
mind this further opposition to the abandonment of pews,
that it involves ordinarily the separation of families.
Here again let me say that if we are ever to have any
widespread success in the free-church movement, this
prejudice — if prejudice it is — must be fairly and gen-
erously dealt with. No change in our customs of wor-
ship which seems rudely to ignore the instincts or affec-
tions of the family will ever make successful progress,
nor does it deserve to. Old as is the Church, the family
is older, and if the one is a Divine institution no less
is the other so. We shall do best, I venture to think,
if we strive to adjust ourselves to the wishes and accom-
modate the preferences, of parents and children in this
matter; and the friends of free churches in England
have shown their w^isdom by endeavoring to do so. In
the Church Congress at Stoke two years ago one of the
speakers at the meeting, in the interests of free and
open churches, argued for an annual assignment of sit-
tings by lot ; and another showed with much ingenuity
how, in a crowded parish church, such as was instanced
at St. Martin's, Scarborough, it was simply necessary to
anticipate a little the hour of attending upon Divine
service in order to secure for any family a certain num-
ber of contiguous sittings. For instance, according to

340 Waymarhs.

the calculation of this speaker, in the church referred
to, a family of sixteen might sit together if they went to
church fifteen minutes before church-time ; that eight
might sit together if they went ten minutes before, and
so on. It is by such homely but practical solutions of
such a difficulty as this, that objections are best met
and prejudices allayed.

(c) I do not forget, 1 need hardly say, that there are
still others of a graver nature and of a more unyielding
character. There are the questions of support, and of
revenue for church purposes, outside of the parish as
well as in it, which I think it must candidly be admitted
have been most imperfectly solved. If free churches have
been successful in maintaining themselves (and they
have not always done that), they have as yet done little
more. And, what is most discouraging of all, the move-
ment has as yet made but the slightest impression upon
the great mass of our prosperous, well-to-do Church
people. These do not believe in it and do not want it.
We may as well face the fact. The clergy who minister
to them are doubtful about the principle, and distrustful
about its practical working. And yet the co-operation
of these two classes is indispensable to ultimate success.

How shall we secure such co-operation ? I answer,
first by invoking it, and then by deserving it ! We must
seek for and ask for the sympathy of all good men,
whether they worship in pewed churches or in free
churches, and we must deserve their sympathy by the
loving fidelity with which we preach and live the Apos-
tle's doctrine of the common brotherhood of all men,

The Free Church A Witness. 341

everywhere, in their common Lord. There is a mediaeval
legend of a priest who, knocking at a peasant's door,
finds his sovereign seated at meat at the peasant's table.
So great is his surprise that he cannot but express his
apprehension as to the effect of such excessive conde-
scension. " But," answers the King, " do we not meet
as brothers about the table of a common Lord, yonder in
the place where you are wont to minister? And if I
own that brotherhood so freely there, shall I not some-
times own it elsewhere also ? " It Avas an answer
which, homely as it seemed, contained the sum and sub-
stance of the whole matter. If they for whom Christ
died are brethren, then let those who say so show the
world that they believe it. No mere toleration of the
poor or the unrefined or the uneducated will do this.
No mere spasm of occasional condescension, whether in
church or out of it, will do it either. Nothing will do
it save a new and mightier baptism of that Divine Spirit
of love and self-forgetfulness for which even now the
Church is waiting ! And therefore, first of all, men and
brethren, let us long and look and pray for that ! Let
us cry straight up to heaven, ay, let the whole Church
lift up her voice to Him who is her living Lord and
Head, for such a Pentecostal breath of life and fire as
shall shrivel and burn up every pitiful prejudice, every
lingering residuum of exclusion, every last and smallest
vestige of self-will and self-love. For then, believe me,
the pew-doors will fly open, because, first of all, God has
made the hearts and the hands that now hold them shut
to fly wide open also !

AGENCIES OF REVIVAL.

In the year 1882 American Churchmen were refreshed
and stimulated by a visit from Canon Knox-Little, who
conducted a Retreat for the Clergy at St. Philip's in the
Highlands; and soon afterwards one or more parochial
^^ missions " were, for the first time, held in parishes in the
United States. To most Churchmen on this side of the
Atlantic, the parochial mission was unknown, and its
characteristics, so far as they were currently reported, led it
to be regarded with suspicion. These characteristics were
considered as not greatly differing from those which had
been popularly associated with revivals and revivalism as
these have long obtained in many religious bodies in
America, and were such as had made themselves widely
obnoxious to severe criticism. The effort to introduce
informal services, meetings for inquiry, services for men,
and other novel features, as it had encountered decided
opposition in England, did not escape it here. Indeed, the
opposition was in many instances the more strenuous
because, in the United States, the evils have been more
familiar.

But it was still believed that even in the Church, with her
ample equipment, the parochial mission had a place; and the
missions conducted by Canon Knox-Little, and later, by the
Rev. Mr. Aitkin, general missioner of the Church of
England Parochial Missions Society, who visited the United
States during the following year, made it evident that that
for which their work stood had a use and fitness for its
place within the Church's lines. A mission in the city of

Agencies of Revival. 343

New York during Advent of the year 1885, in which a large
number of parishes shared, issued, on the whole so en-
couragingly that it was determined to found an American
Parochial Missions Society, having the same general objects as
its English parent. This was done during the same year, and
the sermon which follows was preached on the occasion of its
fifth anniversary, December 16th, 1890, at St. Bartholomew's
Church, New York. The society has one general missioner
and nearly forty missioners and assistant missioners, all but
the first of whom are parochial clergy. These are called
upon to leave their parishes from time to time and go to the
point where a mission is desired, and conduct a series of
special services, of which they have, in each case, exclusive
charge and direction, — the original arrangement, of course,
having been entered into with the cordial consent and
co-operation of the rector.

In some instances these services are little more than
frequent sermons, preceded by the appointed daih^ morning
and evening prayer. In no case are these omitted. In some
cases, more informal meetings, conferences, personal counsels,
short addresses, mission hymns and prayers, other than
those contained in the Prayer-Book or Hymnal, have been
used. But there has never been any effort merely to j^ro-
duce emotional excitement; and preaching and devotion,
while seeking to awaken and arouse, have always aimed to
instruct.

The movement is still too young to afford ground for
a final judgment in regard to it. But two things have
impressed those who have watched it most closely; the first
of which is its unexpected welcome in all cases where
people have observed and noted its operations continuously.
Prejudice has been strong in many reverent minds, which have
honestlj^ dreaded its effect in vulgarizing sacred things.
But such persons have, as a rule, gladly owned its efficacy in
awakening and deepening reverent instincts and serious im-

344 Waymarhs.

pressions. This has been especiaHy true in connection with
a higher estimate and more frequent use of the Holy
Communion.

Another effect has been evident, not so much in the con-
gregations who were the objects of the missions as in the
clergy who have conducted them. These have, in many
instances, developed gifts and aptitudes as preachers which
there is no probability that the routine of an ordinary
ministry would have called forth ; and the Church, at least in
some of its greater centres, is richer to-day because of this
work, not alone for what it has done, but scarcely less
for what it has discovered.

XX.

AGENCIES OF REVIVAL.

In those days came John the Baptist crying, Repent ye !
. . . And the people asked him, saying, What shall ice
do, then? — Matt. iii. 1, 2 ; Luke iii. 10-14.

This is the anniversary, and we are gathered this
evening in the interests of the Parochial Missions
Society. It will clear the air a little if I explain its
title, and define its aims. It is not " parochial " in the
sense of being connected with any parish. It is not a
missionary organization in the sense of supporting a
body of missionaries; and it is not a society in the
sense of having any other than the most informal and
elementary organization.

But it represents those in the Anglican communion
and in our own, who recognize the necessity of at least
occasionally supplementing the ordinary agencies and
ministries of the Church with others, which, going
only and always with the consent and on the invitation
of those who are charged with its care into any parish
when they may be so bidden, bring to it a fresh voice,
direct appeal, frequent services, personal contact, in-
formal meetings for prayer and for inquiry, and such

346 Way marks.

other quickening methods as experience and observa-
tion have tested and vindicated. In other words,
obnoxious as the term may be to some, I know none
better to describe the work of which we have come here
to-night to hear, than to call it a Revival Agency.

As such, one can easily understand the surprise, if
not disapproval, which it will awaken in many minds,
especially in this land, in our own day, and in our own
branch of the Church Catholic.

For in this land revival agencies in the domain of
religion are no new thing. It would be impossible
intelligently to write the religous history of the United
States without taking into account that feature of it for
which revivalism stands. Not in one sect or com-
munion alone, but in almost all, its methods have ob-
tained and its results have been strenuously sought.
Among some bodies of Christians its work is that
which is chiefly valued and most largely counted upon
for all growth or enlargement, and it is not too much
to say that, for considerably more than a century, and
in some of our most numerous religious bodies, all
other agencies, so far as their aggressive work is con-
cerned, are considered as of but secondary and insig-
nificant value.

An agency which has been thus employed and
esteemed for more than a hundred years has made a
record for itself, and may now, at any rate, be dispas-
sionately and impartially judged. And one need have
no hesitation in saying, however estimable are the aims
and spirit of those who have employed it, that the

Agencies of Revival. 347

result of such judgment on the part of a vast and con-
stantly increasing body of devout and thoughtful people,
both within and without those communions in which it
has been employed, is that, on the whole, and as it has
hitherto existed among us, what is known as the revi-
val system is, both in many of its characteristics and
its results, largely vicious and evil. It has exalted
emotionalism at the expense of deliberation in choice
and conscientious purpose in action. It has appealed
to the feelings rather than to the judgment, and has
swayed the passions more than the reason. It has
aimed at producing a spasm rather than a conviction,
and it has, too often, accepted mere physical excitement
in the place of reformation of character. Oftener
than otherwise it has been heated and noisy, rather
than serious and chastened, and its effects have been
very frequently doubted or distrusted, unless they illus-
trated themselves in extravagance of speech, and vehe-
mence of that " bodily exercise " which the Apostle yet
declares "profiteth nothing." These have been among
its conspicuous notes or traits. Its results have been
no less marked.

The inevitable reaction which follows any unusual
excitement of the emotions, has been followed in its
turn, in what is to be found in the vast majority of
cases, by a profound apathy, not only of the religious
sentiment, but of the personal conscience; and to-day
whole regions of country are commonly alleged to bear
witness in their complete indifference to both the moral
and the spiritual, or devotional, elements of religion,
to the desolating effects of the revival system.

348 Waymarks.

At such a moment it may well be asked, What does
this Church want with an agency so unwholesome, with
methods so thoroughly discredited ? Certainly if this
is all of it, it may well want to have nothing whatever
to do with it. But at this point the question is cer-
tainly not an improper one, " Is this all of it ? "
What is the revival system, not as it has sometimes
been travestied and perverted, but as Christian history
describes and defines it ?

For our purpose, one illustration, by way of answer to
that question, is as good as a hundred ; and so I take that
one which is presented in the verses which I have read
as the text. There can be no doubt as to the estimate
put by Christ himself upon the ministry of John the Bap-
tist, and there can be as little concerning the general
character of that ministry. It departed in every partic-
ular from the ordinary and orderly ministries of the
time. Judged by our standards, or by those then prevail-
ing, it was distinctly sensational. It aimed to arouse,
to alarm, to denounce, to scourge. And its effects were
in accordance with its aims. If we should describe
them in the phraseology of our own time, we should say
that there was, in that part of Syria where John the
Baptist preached, a great religious awakening, and it
would be to misrepresent the whole situation, as the
New Testament has preserved the story of it, if we did
not go on to say that the greatest religious movement
which the world has seen turned, as its first hinge,
upon this same religious awakening.

There have been repetitions of it all the way along.

Agencies of Revival. 849

Whether it is Peter the Hermit, or Francis of Assisi,
or Savonarola, or John Huss, or John Wesley, the
thing is too familiar to be ignored or wholly dises-
teemed; and no effort to distinguish between great
national or ecclesiastical movements, occurring at long
intervals, and an agency to be employed in connection
with the ordinary on-going of parish life, though such
a distinction is one which we are bound to recognize,
can dismiss from our rightful consideration such agen-
cies as we are here to-night to plead for. In one sense,
the case of a parish and the case of a church or a nation
are widely different ; but in another they are identical.
The same slumbrous torpor, the same deadness to spir-
itual truths, the same triumph of the spirit of worldli-
ness over the spirit of Christ, exist in one as in the
other. It is, after all, only a question of extent or
degree ; and the exigencies of parochial life in particu-
lar communities often make that necessary, in some
single congregation, which, under other circumstances,
may widely if not universally be necessary.

But what is it that is necessary ? or, in other \rords,
what is it that such an association as this aims to do ?
As it is profoundly sensible of the evil features and
often more evil accessories of the modern system of
revivalism, it ought hardly to be necessary to say that
it does not propose to borrow or to revive these. As
it is equally sensible of what I may call the distinc-
tive traditions of this Church, — traditions, let me
say, which, however ridiculed or travestied, have been,
as I believe, a large element of her strength and

350 Wat/marks.

glory, and which no intelligent man will disesteem;
traditions which bind her to reverence, to ritual order,
to the resolute restraint of the vagaries of individualism
in worship, to the systematic teaching of the young,
and to the whole scheme of Christian nurture as the
true ideal of the Church's life and growth, — as, I say,
this society is equally sensible of the Church's tradi-
tion in regard to all these things, it is not here, I need
hardly say, to flout or undervalue them. But it is here
to recognize the fact that that very order and system
which are typically and pre-eminently represented in
what we call the sequence of the Christian, as distin-
guished from the secular year, itself presents to us
conspicuous features which stand, substantially, for
just what we stand for. In other words. Advent and
Lent, whatever else they mean, mean pre-eminently
that the ordinary crust of an ordinary life must be
broken up, once and again, by that which forces itself
in upon it with calls that are sharp, personal, and
searching, — by hymns and litanies, by Scriptures and
sermons, Avhich deal with sin and spiritual insensibil-
ity, and an alienated and a sense-loving life. Ash-
Wednesday! We have lost the sackcloth and the
cinders out of our life, — though I should think that
sometimes some of those silly souls of both sexes that
are eaten up with the vanity of personal upholstery
and tailor-made frippery would ache, for very contrast,
to fly to them, — we have lost, I say, the sackcloth
and the cinders out of our life, but certainly we
have not come to disesteem what Ash-Wednesday

Agencies of Revival. 351

and all the thirty-nine days that follow it stand for.
There is no honest and earnest soul — honest with it-
self and earnest toward God — that does not cry out,
sometimes at any rate, for something from without to
come in upon the dull, dead, monotony of its indul-
gences and its softnesses, and with stern hand to shake
it free from the unutterable pettiness and self-seeking
of which its life is so full. Go into some great hall
where a throng of hungry-eyed people are waiting for
some new voice to stir and thrill them ; and when you
have discounted the vagrant curiosity and the unoccu-
pied speculation, and the ecclesiastical rounderdom that
contributes so largely to all such assemblages, there
still remains a vast multitude of people who are hun-
gry for the word of command, and whom no eccentricity
of costume or absurdity of pretension will quite repel, if
only they can find, what, alas, they so rarely find, behind
all this very human mannerism or self-consciousness,
some few moments, even, of that "rapt vision of God,"
when an earnest soul is caught up, with an Apostle of
old, and speaks as with tones not of earth to that in us
which is deepest and most central I This want, I say, the
Church, even in her ordinary and usual order, distinctly
recognizes, and thus the only question which practically
remains in this connection is the question whether that
order adequately and sufficiently supplies it.

As to that, I think there need be no serious question.
If the Church of which you and I are ministers —
for in a very real sense we are all ministers — has a
mission only to one class, undoubtedly this society is

352 Waymarks.

an impertinence, and our presence here an anachron-
ism. And. it is idle to deny that there are a great
many serious and devout people who are secretly per-
suaded, though they may be reluctant openly to admit
it, that this is so. It is said that a young clergyman
who went to his bishop for permission to use a service
not in the prayer-book, in a mission hall, was met with
an injunction to confine himself strictly to the order of
Morning and Evening Prayer as set forth by the Gen-
eral Convention. " But, sir ! " said the stripling, " I
can never reach the people in that way ! " " So much
the worse for the people ! " answered the bishop, and
I have not the smallest doubt that he profoundly be-
lieved it. In other words, I have no doubt that a really
godly and honest man was persuaded that if there were
human beings who could not be reached with "dearly
beloved brethren " and the " Venite " and the " Bene-
dietuSj^^ they could only be dismissed to that Larger
Hope in which most certainly he himself did not
believe !

But the conditions of the mission hall are becoming
more and more — God be thanked for it! — the condi-
tions of many of our congregations, and of that con-
stantly increasing fringe of interested people who are,
so far as positive Churchmanship is concerned, still in
the " court of the Gentiles. " These are looking to the
Church not alone for a reverent worship, but first for
a message of life and grace. Tired men and discour-
aged men, and guilty men, people who, weary and
heavy-laden, now as of old, are waiting till some clear

Agencies of Revival. 353

and persuasive voice shall bid them "come," — all
these you could indeed have found here this morning
and everywhere else that an altar is reared and men are
called to pray. And if you say that such quickening
and decisive words as I have referred to are what they
ought to hear from those who are set over them in holy
things, and what, in the happy experience of many to
whom I speak this evening, they do hear, — I gladly
and thankfully own it. But 1 affirm no less that,
estimating the gifts of the ministry as it exists in our
day as highly as we please, there still remains a place
in even the best-ordered and best-instructed parochial
system for a fresh voice, for that gift which not all
great preachers have, of direct and personal address,
and most of all, — for on this, I confess, I set chief
value, — for those personal contacts which are, after
all, the most potent force in any ministry, even as they
are the rarest and most difficult to achieve.

And just here I ask your attention to a passage in
the Annual Report of this society, of especial perti-
nency and significance. "Everywhere," it says, "we
hear the same story: 'We did not reach many outside,
but our own people have been greatly blessed.' Men
and women who have been content with a quiet, lan-
guid discharge of their own religious duties, who
apparently never dreamed that the words, ' Save thyself
and them that hear thee,' apply to any but an ordained
minister of Christ, have been awakened to a sense of
their own responsibility to God, and have consecrated
themselves to His service." Yes, there is the fact

23

354 Waymarhs.

in this business of paramount and pre-eminent impor-
tance ! We are living in a time when it is the dream of
reformers of whatever class and kind, social, political
or moral, to heal the evils of the time by dealing with
men and women en masse. They are to be housed and
fed in crowds, and taught to vote by committees, and
made godly by the excitement and huzzas of a religious
mass-meeting, or a Gospel "drill." There never w^as
a more dangerous or pestilent fallacy since the world
began ; for it substitutes the coercive power of official
mechanism for the personal influence of personal en-
deavor, and the vicarious activities of a hired multi-
tude for the solitary consecration of our individual
gifts. And the worst of such substitution is that it
falls in so entirely with our own indolent preposses-
sions. We go to a religious meeting and hear an
impassioned appeal, and note its effect upon others,
and feel ourselves something of the pleasurable experi-
ence of quickened pulses and excited emotions, and we
go away and say, " AVhat a delightful meeting ! Surely
such stirring appeals must do a great deal of good."
On the contrary, there is no smallest certainty in such
a case of any good whatever. It all depends upon what
that is that comes after ; and what that is depends in-
deed upon the individual resolution of those who are so
moved, but it depends no less largely upon the subse-
quent influences brought to bear upon one so awakened
from without. It is personal interest, and unwearied
solicitude, and individual pleading, and teaching, and
warning, that, under God, make of awakened people

Agencies of Revival. 355

steadfast Christian disciples; and nothing else will
make them so; and it is that, I maintain, that this
society pre-eminentl}^ stands for. It does not under-
value the uses of religious excitement, but it rates
them at their true worth. It does not disesteem the
stirring message of some modern John the Baptist, but
it follows that message with something more, and more
personal, precisely as he followed his. Is there any-
thing in the New Testament more eternally significant
as indicating the true methods of the true missioner
than the verses succeeding that which I have read to
you ? First, " Repent ye I " " Repent ye I " " Repent
ye ! '' And then tears and clamor and passion ? No,
no! Then reformation of conduct, the righting of
wrongs, the telling of the truth, the ennobling of the
life. "Do violence to no man, neither accuse any
falsely, and be content with your wages." We are
some of us very much afraid of a system of spiritual
direction; and if it is to degenerate into the confes-
sional as it exists in the Roman communion to-day
(concerning which, if any of us is enamoured of it, I
advise him to read Mr. Capes' remarkable book, "To
Rome and Back ") ^ we may well be afraid of it. But
there is a place in the spiritual life of the Church for
the guidance, personal, individual, particular, by their
instructed and experienced brethren, of the young, the
inexperienced, the doubting, the new convert, the
"stranger in our gates," which, more than all other

1 To Rome and Back. Rev. John Capes, M. A. London : Smith,
Elder, & Co. 1873.

356 . Waymarks.

wants, is the want of the Church in our day. Not to
think that you can lose yourself in the mass, but that
if you have experience, maturity, knowledge, sympa-
thy, the power of influence, you must take these things
and use them for the cause of Christ in helping some
other soul, — and that it is at the peril of your own soul
and the peril of the souls of your weaker brethren that
you refuse to do so, — this is what our society stands
for, and what it aims to awaken men and women to do.

I bless God that in our brancn oi the Church Catho-
lic we are so widely doing it. With characteristic
nobility of reserve, and with generous magnanimity of
approbation, where approbation could possibly be given,
did the Archbishop of Canterbury, the other day, at
once recognize all that deserved recognition in efforts,
under other auspices than those of the Church, to reach
the neglected and the outcast. But he might easily
have gone farther than he did. He might have pointed
out that in agencies similar to this, without blare of
trumpet or flaunting of banners, the Church of Eng-
land — and, following her inspiring example, our own
— has not only preached in fields, in streets, and in
omnibus -yards, but, first of all, has preached to itself,
and stirred a glow of enthusiasm to which missions
and missioners, Toynbee Hall and Oxford House, the
work on London Docks and in slums, and alleys, and
g?,rrets here in our own land, bedr witness, — has not
only aroused men, but has taught and uplifted them ;
and, best of all, has thrilled into passionate life and
eager self-sacrifice in behalf of their brethren brave

Agencies of Revival. 357

and earnest souls, both there and here, of whose glori-
ous labors, and their glorious results, we shall fully
know only at the last Great Day.

Ye see, then, brethren, your calling, — yes, yours
and mine. The Church is here in the world to dis-
dain no instrument for good, however humble, or how-
ever misused. Here, in this work, is one of them.
May God give us courage to use it with wisdom and
power to His glory 1

MISSION AND COMMISSION.

The first bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, like him in
connection with whose consecration the following sermon
was preached, was a native of Massachusetts, and a graduate,
in A. D. 1744, of Harvard College. Edward Bass was born
in Dorchester; ordained deacon in the chapel of Fulham
Palace, London, by the Eight Rev. Dr. Sherlock, the bishop
of that diocese, and priest a week after his ordination to
the diaconate, in the same place and by the same prelate.
He was consecrated bishop in Christ Church, Philadelphia,
May 7, 1797, and one of his consecrators was Dr. Thomas
John Claggett, the first bishop consecrated in the United
States, — the others being Bishops White of Pennsylvania
and Provoost of New York. Seven years later Bishop Bass
was succeeded by Dr. Samuel Parker, also a New Englander
by birth and a graduate of Harvard College, who was conse-
crated in New York on September 14, 1804. Dr. Parker
died three months after his consecration, without having
performed one episcopal act.

His successor was Dr. Alexander Viets Griswold, a saint
and missionary, to whom, owing to the weakness of the
Church in New England which denied a bishop to a
single commonwealth, was committed what was called ''the
Eastern Diocese," — a jurisdiction including Maine, New
Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Khode Island.
Dr. Griswold, a native of Connecticut, was, like his prede-
cessor, consecrated in Trinity Church, New York, on May
29, 1811, Massachusetts having thus been without episcopal

Mission and Commission. 359

oversight — for which then, indeed, it had very small de-
sire — for seven years.

Bishop Griswold's episcopate continued until February 15,
1843, during which time he became presiding bishop of the
Episcopal Church in America. He fell dead in Boston at the
door of his assistant and successor. Dr. Manton Eastburn,
who had been consecrated only a few weeks before, — De-
cember 29, 1842, in Trinity Church, Boston. Bishop East-
burn was a native of Leeds, England — and he never forgot it.
His venerated predecessor had been an American of the
Americans in his simplicity, primitiveness of habits, man-
ners, and tastes, and in his traditional identity with Xew
England. Of singular meekness, and no less singular wis-
dom. Bishop Griswold left behind him the fragrant memory
of a wise and gentle ministry, in which the episcopal never
wholly displaced the pastoral and parochial work, and from
which there has come down to later da3^s the image of one with
exceptional aptitudes for commending the Church to a gener-
ation that disliked or distrusted her.

His successor. Dr. Eastburn, had been eminent, in the
Churcli of the Ascension in New York, as a preacher, and
was a man of exceptional culture for his day, and of a rare
taste in ancient as well as modern literature. By tempera-
ment and inheritance he was eminently a conservative, and
he neither greatly desired the influx of those connected with
other communions into the Church, nor encouraged it. But
while tenacious of his opinions and adverse to change, he
was the friend of all good men and good works, and devout,
courageous, and courteous under all circumstances.

Bishop Eastburn died September 12, 1872, and was suc-
ceeded by the Bight Rev. Henry Benjamin Paddock, D.D.,
of Brooklyn, N. Y., who was consecrated in that city at
Grace Cliurch, September 17, 1873. He died March 9,
1891, after an episcopate distinguished bj^ unwearied devo-

360 Waymarks.

tion to his work and his flock, and endeared to all who knew
him by the gentle dignity, transparent purity, and devout
consistency of his life and character.

The sermon which follows was preached at the consecra-
tion of his successor. Dr. Phillips Brooks, at Trinity Church,
Boston, of which he had been rector for more than twenty
years, on Wednesda3^, October 14, 1891.

XXI.

MISSION AND COMMISSION.

As they ministered to the Lor'd, and fasted, the Holy Ghost
said, Sei^arate me Barnabas and Saul for the luork where-
unto I have called them. And when they had fasted and
prayed, and laid their hands on them they sent them away.
So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed. —
Acts xiii. 2-4.

Stir up the gift of God which is in thee by the putting on of
my hands. — 2 Timothy i. 6.

In words such as these we have a picture out of that
earliest life of the Church, of which the books from
which I take it tell the story. How fresh and vivid it
is ! What high enthusiasm, what uncalculating ardor,
what unhesitating self-sacrifice ! One does not need to
be in sympathy with their beliefs or at one with their
aims, even, as a good deal of modern literature has
taught us, to be moved by their fervor or kindled at
least into admiration by the story of those earliest min-
istries. The coldest heart must own that, whether it
were myth or fable that stirred them, for a while at any
rate a new spell had touched the world, and a new voice
had spoken to waiting and eager souls. We look at the
mighty forces against which the first Christian disciples

362 Waymarhs.

hurled themselves, we look at the spiritual torpor, the
blank hopelessness, the unutterable moral degradation
to which they made their appeal, and we wonder at
their audacity — or their faith ! No hostility daunted
them ; no indifference discouraged them ; no tremendous
bulk of evil deterred them. The work they aimed to do,
men told them, was impossible work. They simply re-
fused to believe it. The obstacles which confronted
them, other men told them were insurmountable obsta-
cles. They simply refused to see it. They were on fire
with a consuming purpose, and they did not stop,
whether to measure their task or to discuss its difficul-
ties. This, we say, is the fruit of a great enthusiasm.
It always works this way, and it would be without re-
sults if it did not.

Yes, but the moment that we look a little closer at
the story of this enthusiasm, we see that along with it
there was something more. It has been common to
disparage the gifts of the first founders of Christianity,
and to seek to make the more of its distinctive char-
acteristics by making as little as possible of the men
who illustrated them. According to our standards,
doubtless, they were not very learned nor very influen-
tial persons. They have been called — the College of
the Twelve Apostles — a handful of peasants ; and, in
one sense some of them were. They have been described
as insignificant among the great of their own day ; and
measured in one way they were. But when we come
closer to some at least among them we cannot so easily
disesteem them. One anion ii:; them was chosen to be

Mission and Commission. 363

the leader among his fellows. Can anybody who reads
the story of his life find it easy to believe that he had
not in him the natural genius of leadership ? If there
are in certain types of organized Christian society what
we may call Petrine qualities, can it be doubted that
they find their first and most characteristic illustration
in him who was Simon Peter ? Or again, if there has
been in all ages of the Church what we may call the
philosophic instinct, is it difficult to trace its source to
those letters of that pupil of Gamaliel who came in time
to reveal the resplendent intellectual qualities of Paul
the apostle to the Gentiles ? The interrogative impulse
of Thomas the twin, the affectionate brotherliness of
Andrew the missionary, — were not each of these in
their way distinctive personal traits, some of them of a
very rare and beautiful quality, which go no little way
to explain what more than one of them did to forward
the knowledge and hasten the triumph of the cause to
which he had committed himself ? Surely he alone can
say so who has not studied the quality of their work,
of whatever kind it was, nor measured the character of
its results. There was high enthusiasm, there was con-
suming ardor, but along with these in every most note-
worthy instance of apostolic achievement there was
some distinct natural endowment which would have
given its possessor anywhere commanding influence
among men.

And so it has always been. God has indeed often
chosen by the " foolishness of preaching," as it has
seemed to some poor souls irresponsive to its mighty

364 Waymarks.

power, to save them that believe ; but it has not been by
foolish preaching. The voices that have stirred the
world, the messages that have thrilled and enkindled
cold and discouraged hearts have not been the voices or
the messages of fools. Whatever strange passion in-
flamed them, whatever tense and eager purpose would
not give them pause, if in them there was lifting and
awakening power, if their words not merely kindled the
emotions but convinced the reason and persuaded the
judgment, it was because behind the passion there was a
thinking, reasoning man., speaking out of the large and
rich manhood in himself to the manhood of other men.
And so, to come back to the picture with which we
started, does anybody suppose, when at Antioch the
Church in that busy city fasted and celebrated its
solemn Eucharist, and prepared to choose those who
were to go forth on its high errands, that " Simeon that
was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen
which had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch,"
and the rest of them were there at hap-hazard ? Out
from these half-dozen men, more or less, were to be
chosen two to be consecrated on that memorable day to
a great and memorable work. Do you suppose that
those who a little later laid their hands on them con-
cerned themselves in no wise, beforehand, to find out
what kind of men they had been, what sort of gifts
were theirs, what order of work they had accomplished,
just in precisely the same way that before appointing
any man in this community to any responsible task, his
fellows are wont to inquire what sort of gifts he has ?

Mission and Commission, 365

In one place we read, in this story of first eK/cXrjaLa
building, of men as commended to the confidence of their
fellows because they had " hazarded their lives." Very
well, then, those who chose them wanted courage. In
another place we read of a Pagan ruler, stupid and sunk
in his sins, as saying to a Christian apostle, " Almost
thou persuadest ?7ie." Very well, then, again, they
wanted logic. Do you suppose that they did not seek
for eloquence (if they could find it), for sympathy, for
the quick power of understanding another's perplexities,
for that infinite hopefulness of human nature which, I
sometimes think, is quite its finest quality ? We may
be sure they did. And no less sure may we be that
when Barnabas and Saul were singled out from among
their associates for the rare dignity of suffering and
loneliness and privation in their high office, they were
chosen because, anywhere, and among any set of men,
and in whatever service, they would sooner or later, but
inevitably, have come to the front.

Yes, but how were they singled out ? We advance a
step farther in that story which I have recalled to you,
and Ave read that " As they fasted and ministered before
the Lord, there came a voice which said, ' Separate . . .
Barnabas and Saul for the work.' " Whose voice was
it ? Were those men called thus to their high office by
the high acclaim of a public assembly ? For myself I
have little doubt, that before the Voice that spoke those
few words was heard, there had been heard another and
more multitudinous one. That city of Antioch in which
Simeon, and Lucius, and the rest of them were gathered

366 Waymarks.

contained the first church organized among the Gen-
tiles, and it became in time the centre of those mission-
ary activities by which the Roman world was evangelized.
The prophets and teachers who began the work were
supplemented, later, by Barnabas and Saul ; and step by
step in the simple story we may trace the unfolding of
the organic life of the Church. There was an assembly
first, and then there came to be the ecclesia, — avva')(^
Orjvai iv ttj eKKXrjaid, — and it was this community of
the brethren, it may easily have been, that with more or
less formality first indicated its preferences, and pointed
its finger of designation towards the men who were fittest
and worthiest for the higher service of the Church.

But this was not Mission. That comes into view
when we read that the Voice which said, " Separate
Barnabas and Saul," was the Voice of the Holy Ghost.
It is not only " separate ; " it is " separate Me." It is
not only for the work ye are to separate them, but
"for the work whereunto I have called them." And
thus we come into the presence of that unique dis-
tinction which forever differentiates the enthusiasm of
the disciples of Jesus Christ from all other enthu-
siasms. It was the enthusiasm of a new creation by
the power of a Divine breath. One day, a little before,
the Master of twelve men is about to vanish out of their
sight. One who had come back to draw about Him
anew a little band of personal followers, meets them on
the first day of the week, and saying to them, "As
my Father hath sent me, even so send I you," " He
breathed on them and said, ' Receive ye the Holy

Mission and Commission. 367

Ghost.' " ^ A little later this same Being, ascending
up from these same followers, bids them " depart not
from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Fa-
ther." 2 Well, they wait, and the promise is fulfilled.
" There came a sound from heaven," we read, " and they
were all filled with the Holy Ghost." ^ Henceforth
there was a new Force in the world, and they were
never without it. It is the seven-fold power of God
the Holv Ghost. Call it an influence, water it down
to be a cult, disparage it as so much mysticism, verily
you will have to tear yonder story to pieces, and hunt
out with microscope and dissecting knife the very struc-
tural fibre of those first parchments on which the Gospel
story was written, before you can get that element out
of it! Bereft of the mission and work of the Holy
Ghost, calling, arresting, convicting, convincing, enlight-
ening, transforming, empowering, — the whole fabric of
primitive history becomes somehow invertebrate, and
crumbles into a shapeless mass of incident and talk.
Nothing is more tremendous in its significance than the
way in which all that new life of the first century takes
its rise in the active, audible, commanding Presence in
the Church of the Holy Ghost, and from all excursions,
activities, or ministries, forever returns to it. The visit
of Peter and John to Samaria, the descent of the Spirit
at Cassarea, the coming of Saint Paul to Ephesus, are all
parts of a whole, of which the calling of Barnabas and
Saul is but another part. There was a new and com-
manding Voice ; it spoke with unhesitating authority.

1 St. John XX. 21, 22. ^ ^cts i. 4. ^ Acts ii. 2, 4.

368 Waymarks.

There was a new and regenerating breath. It came
with irresistible power. And when it came the world
was transfigured, and man himself transformed. Out
into that ^v^ild waste of sin and shame the men to whom
it came went forth, and notliing was able to withstand
them. Whatever they had been in themselves, this new
Force and Fire somehow multiplied and enlarged them.
Not alone on the day of Pentecostal baptism, but all the
way down and on, they spake with other tongues as the
Spirit gave them utterance. And this they, and those
who have succeeded them, have been doing ever since.
If they have forgotten that heaven-given Source of their
strength, that strength has dwindled and shrunk. If
they have remembered it, no lapse of centuries nor
changes of custom have been sufficient to stale its fresh-
ness nor to resist its transforming spell. This iraXiyye-
veaia — yes, that was it — still stii'S and quickens the
Church, and is the supreme secret of its power. In one
word, that which gave to these men, and to those who
have come after them in that Divine society of which
they were the ministers, the authority whether to teach
or to rule, was not their native gifts, — however great
they may have been, nor however largely they may have
been considered in their clioice, — but the calling and
the sending of the Holy Ghost.

But a still further question remains to be answered.
What was not alone the evidence or token of that mis-
sion, but its authentication ? Was this the whole story
of that mission, — that certain men being assembled to-
gether, a voice said, " Separate me Barnabas and Saul,"

Mission a7id Commissio7i. 369

and that then those who were named separated them-
selves and went away, and henceforth did their work as
men fully and sufficiently authorized and empowered
thus for its discharge ? On the contrary, there is some-
thing more in the history, which we may not arbitrarily
leave out, and which is just as essential to its integrity
as anything that has gone before. We may wish that
it were not there. We may believe it to have been the
source of endless and most hurtful superstitions. We
may dismiss it as a relic of that out-worn ceremonialism
from which the world of that day was not yet wholly
free. But still it is there ; and, as honest men, we must
deal frankly and honestly with it. For this is the story
in its completeness : " The Holy Ghost said, ' Separate
me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have
called them.' And when they had fasted and prayed,
and laid their haiids on the77i, they sent them away. So
they, bei^ig sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed.'*
Certainly, there is no obscurity here. Juggle with the
words as one may, he cannot separate the inward call
and the outward ordinance, the spiritual mission and
the tactual commission, the divine empowerment and
the human authentication of it.

Let no one 'misunderstand me. Am I affirming^ that
the gifts and powers of the Holy Ghost are invariably
and exclusively tied to the agencies ordained for their
transmission ? I am affirming nothing of the sort. Who
are we that we sliould limit the power of that Divine
Spirit which first brooded upon chaos and evoked from
it order and beauty and life ? There are some of us

24

370 Waymarhs.

here who must always gratefully remember saintly an-
cestors who disesteemed, if they did not despise, all visi-
ble ordinances, and dismissed them utterly out of the
horizon whether of their observance or of their belief.
Happy he who, with the help of church and sacrament
and duly transmitted ministry in all their fullest com-
pleteness, can emulate their sainthood, and tread at ever
so great a distance in their holy footsteps ! But all the
same, " God is not the author of confusion in the
churches of the saints ; " and as, from the beginning,
it has been a law of that order that He shall work,
whether in His kingdom of Nature or His kingdom of
Grace, along the lines of His own divine appointment,
so it will be to the end. Departures, revolts, long-con-
tinued disregard and indifference there may be, with
perhaps large if not quite complete justification, and
along with these there may be also the most strenuous
service, the widest learning, the most ardent faith, the
most beautiful self-sacrifice. And all these shall be the
fruit of that " self-same Spirit " which worketh the one
thing, though not necessarily or invariably by the one
way. But still the fact remains that there is a way
which is of God's appointment ; there is a ministry
which He first commissioned, and which they whom He
first commissioned passed on and down to others. Its
authority does not come up from the people ; it de-
scends from the Holy Ghost. And, as in the beginning
its outward and visible sign was the laying on of apos-
tolic hands upon men called, whether to this or that
or the other service, — pastoral, priestly, or prophetic,

Mission and Commission. 371

yet still to an apostolic ministry, — so it has been ever
since. We may exaggerate or travesty it as we please.
We may exult over its corruptions and ridicule its pre-
tensions, and deride its efficacy. None of these things
can dismiss out of human history or human conscious-
ness this fact that, unless we are to dismiss the whole
story of which it is a part, the apostolic ministry is an
ordering of divine appointment, apart from which you
cannot find any clear trace of a primitive ministry or a
primitive Church. We turn from this scene at Antioch
to those memorable ministries that came after it. One
of them stands forth conspicuous above all the aposto-
lates of its age, — unique in its energy, unapproachable
in its heroism, incomparable alike in the power of its
preaching and in the inexhaustible richness of its writ-
ings. What a fine scorn there is in those writings for
that retrospective piety which lingered regretfully among
the beggarly elements of the elder order and ritual, —
what impatience of the letter, what bold assertion of
Christian liberty, what intense ardor of spiritual enthu-
siasm ! Yes, but what scrupulous respect for authority,
what careful observance of apostolic tradition, what rev-
erent use of appointed means. There came a day in the
ministry of this grand Apostle when he is to set apart
a youthful disciple and son in the faith to be an over-
seer of the church in Ephcsus. How does he do it ?
Does he tell him of the work that he is to do, and then
simply dismiss him to do it ? Does he say, " Go, my
son, and tell men in Asia Minor the story of your Lord's
love, and write me occasionally how you are getting

372 Waymarks.

on " ? Not such is the meaning of that clear and un-
equivocal language wliich he uses, " Stir up the gift of
God which is in thee," — and which is in thee not by
inherited cleverness, or acquired learning, or popular
endorsement, — but " by [8ta, the Greek is] the laying
on of my hands ; " or, as the same fact is elsewhere
stated, " Neglect not the gift that was given thee . . .
with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery."
And thus once and again does this Apostle of a spiritual
religion guard against that disesteem of the outward in-
stitutions of the Church, without which history, and that
not so very ancient either in this our western world,
demonstrates that religion runs thin and runs out.

It is this fact which explains our presence here to-day.
There is, indeed, a theory of Christianity which resolves
it chiefly into forms and ceremonies, which makes the
means the end ; ihQ instrument the result ; the sign
the thing signified. In all ages of the world it has
illustrated an enormous power, — first of obscuring
essential truth, and then of debilitating human faith
and conduct. I do not wonder that men are afraid of
it. I do not wonder that, in the history of the Church,
men have run out of her cold ceremonialism, wher-
ever, as so widely, it has been dominant, into whatever
warmth and ardor, into whatever purity and simplicity,
offered them a refuge from its stiff and frigid and often
corrupt formality. Most heavy is their responsibility
because of whose soulless idolatry of the letter and the
ceremony, this has come to pass. But still the fact re-
mains : Christ did not leave his truth and fellowship in

Mission and Commission. 378

the world unorganized and disembodied. His own com-
ing was a veritable incarnation, — no shadowy ghost-
ministry, inaudible, invisible, and intangible. And His
continued incarnation in His Church is but the transfor-
mation of His embodiment in one, into His ever-living
and ever-active embodiment in the whole. I am told
that you and I must believe in an invisible Church.
Very well ; let us do so so far as we can. But as yet
the only Church of which I know, in the way in which I
can know anything, is a visible Church, with a visible
order, and visible sacraments, and a visible fellowship,
and which thus witnesses to me the continued life and
power of its invisible Lord and Head, once Himself em-
bodied in our flesh among us. One day I shall doubtless
know something else and more, of which this visible
Church is a part ; but as yet the sphere of my activities
must be found within the fellowship of that historic
body of which thus far this morning I have been speak-
ing. As one of New England's prophets — himself, I
think, farthest removed from the Church's conception of
historic Christianity — has said : —

" There are reasoners whose generalizations have carried
them so far as to leave all names of Church or Christianity
behind in contempt. But when the generalizing process can
seduce a writer to the extent of declaring that there is no
moral difference worth considering between one man and an-
other, and leads a second writer to smooth over, as a trifling
roughness in the grain of the wood, the distinction between
evil and good, a question may perhaps arise, alike in a re-
ligious or a philosophic mind, whether there is not some point
for generalization to stop. If excessive particularizing makes

374 Way marks.

the bigot with his narrow mind, or the superstitious man
with his false reverence, too much generalizing empties the
heart clean of its warmth and friendshij) and worship. It
abolishes all terms. It dissolves individual existence. It
leaves the soul a mere subject, with no relations recognized
to human creatures or to God himself.

^^One thinker may say, ' I care for no ecclesiastical asso-
ciations whatsoever, and find my only Church in the world. '
But the world proves, as Jesus and his Apostles describe it,
too wide, imperfect, and still evil either to embrace his
holy efforts, or to give his spirit a home. He must, in con-
tradiction of his theorj^, abide in and act from a grander,
though in visible dimensions a smaller circle, before he can
act to bless and save the world itself.

''Another thinker proclaims his allegiance to God in his
pure infinity alone, leaving the Christ of the Gospel aside.
But let his doctrine of space and science and omnipresence
of one solitary Power through earth and stars, recommend
itself as it may to the speculative mind, it spreads [but] a
thin atmosphere around us, in which we feel discouraged and
cold, like explorers of the Arctic region of thought, and we
cry out for a nearer and somehow more human divinity.
This is the unspeakable boon Jesus confers on the human
race, that he familiarizes and domesticates God, shows him
in a mortal frame, and by his incarnation of the great Spirit
makes us partakers of the Divine nature more than we could
become by the discovery of ten thousand new systems, or by
peering forever into the measureless expanse of the milky
way. ' ' ^

So speaks another far removed from ourselves. Yes,
but if this was the meaning and power of that Incarna-
tion of the Son of God whereby He became the son of

^ Bartol, Church and Congregation, pp. 20-22.

Mission and Commission. 375

Mary, what shall we say of that other and wider incar-
nation which He finds in the life of His Church ? Is
that to be the shadowy, filmy, ghostly thing that He
who founded it was Himself most surely not ? No, no ;
the Church is still here a visible Body, with visible Ordi-
nances, its life descending (wherever else life may be)
along appointed lines by ordered modes which He Him-
self, who is its Head, ordained or else inspired. The
pendulum swings to and fro, now this way for centuries,
and then the other way ; but underneath its widest diver-
gencies as it moves to left or right there is this central
fact of the Incarnate Ministry of the Son of God, and all
that it means to-day in the life and work of His Church.
There may be some of us who are bred so fine, or who
have climbed so high, that all the outward is for us of
small account. Our homage is for great ideas, we say,
working along lofty lines of thought, and appealing to
the intellectual rather than the affectional or emotional
nature. Yes, and the time may come when in such an
ideal of fellowship with Jesus Christ both reason and
faith shall find their most perfect satisfaction. But it
has not come yet. The world, in the conditions of its
life and thought, whatever may have been the progress
of the race, remains under the same limitations as those
amid which Jesus wrought when first He came to men.
It is still a world of sight and sound, of taste and touch,
as well as of intuition and reason and imagination.
The warrior still cherishes his bit of ribbon symbolic of
heroic suffering ; why may not the Christian cherish
some simple emblem of the passion of His Lord ? The

376 Way marks.

soldier still wears his crimson sash or scarf. Why may
I not wear a black or a white one ? The old man still
recalls, with inextinguishable tenderness and gratitude
the father's hand once laid in benediction on his boyish
head. And shall we not prize the hands that once,
when we knelt at yonder chancel rail, or at some other,
were laid upon ours ? Ah, believe me, He who" knew
what was in man did not touch, and touch, and touch
again for nothing ! Take His human hand, outstretched
to bless, to heal, to open, to awaken, to break and to
distribute, but always touching, — no vileness too vile for
its cleansing contact, no slumber too deep for its awak-
ening call, no impotence too utter for its transforming
power, — take all that that Hand has wrought and has
translated to men, the miracles of God, the tenderness of
God, the never wearying succor and salvation of God,
out of the Gospel story, and you have bereft that story
almost beyond repair.

But just here, it may be said, " All this is very pretty,
very clever, very adroit indeed, but how unutterably
small and petty ! How pitiful is this resting in the form,
as if it mattered with what form or with what commission
you or I wrought, so long as we cling to the essence and
the spirit of the Master's teaching. Pray let us dismiss
these dreary and unprofitable discussions about the
visible in Christianity, and get down to the life and soul
of it ! " Men and brethren, there never was a more
solemn impertinence under the sun ! Believe me, I am
as much concerned as anybody to get down to the life
and soul of Christianity ; but as I never knew, nor

Mission and Commission. 377

you, of any other life and soul without a body in all the
history of this world of ours, neither may we look for
any other in the life of God's Church. But whether
we do or not, what I resent most of all is that in-
tolerable presumption and perverseness which in dis-
cussing the question of the Body of Christ in the world
persists in putting asunder what not I or any body of
conceited ecclesiastics, but Jesus Christ himself hath
joined together. It is not more certain that He has
revealed a grace than that He has ordained means of
grace. The two are not enemies. They are rather
parts of one whole, and the whole is of His ordering.
And therefore our office, however clever we may be,
or however sublimated our ideas, is to own that one-
ness and humbly to cherish and honor it. We need to
reverence the Sacrament as well as Him who appointed
it. We need to cherish the Order as well as to pay our
homage to Him who in the beginning called forth and
commissioned those who were its founders. And most
of all, I think, we need to try and see how now, at any
rate, when some of the most aggressive intellectual
forces of our time are busy in the endeavor to dismiss
out of the realm of religion positive facts and a divine
revelation, it is our business to hold fast to that divine
society and that primitive ministry which were appointed
to conserve and proclaim them both. " By no unmean-
ing chance," says the venerable teacher from whom I
have already quoted, " is the Church so often on our
tongues. Not in vain does the reformer with his sharp-
est criticism pay to her his respect. No rotten and

378 Waymarks.

crumbling ark do her children stay up and bear on with
their hands. What but the Church is rooted and grow-
ing forever in the all- wasting floods of time ? No other
institution of government or society, from the farthest
right to the extreme left of human speculation, so
widely and clearly touches the thought of the age." ^

And so to-day we come, in this persuasion, to set
apart one whose ministry within the walls of this his-
toric Church has spoken so widely and so helpfully
to the thought of our age. We are not here, as in a
drawing-room, to give him our congratulations. We are
here in God's sanctuary to give him our commission.
Henceforth he is to be a bishop in the Church of God,
to whom no one of all God's children is to be alien or
remote. " Reverend Father in God^^ we shall say
presently to him who is to be the consecrator of this our
brother, as best describing his relations both to this
occasion and to the Church whose servant he is. Could
there be a designation more affecting or more inspiring ?
How many aching hearts there are to-day, adrift on the
sea of out-worn human systems, weary of doubt, stained
by sin, discouraged, lonely, or forgotten of their fellow-
men, who are waiting for one in whose great soul a
divine Fatherhood of love and compassion lives anew to
recall and arouse and ennoble them ! We speak of the
limitations of the Episcopate in these modern days, and
it has its limitations. I am not sure that on the whole
they are not wise ones. We in America have shorn the

1 Church and Congregation, by Rev. Dr. C. A. Bartol, Introduction,
p. 7.

Mission and Commission. 379

office of much of its state, and ceremony, and secular
authority, and in doing so I am persuaded that we have
done well. The true power of the Episcopate must for-
ever be in the exercise of those spiritual gifts and graces
of which it is the rightful, as it was meant to be the
lowly, inheritor. But for the exercise of these there
are, verily, no limitations. No human interest, no
social problem, no personal sorrow or want can be alien
to the true bishop. Whether he will or not, his office
lifts him out of narrower interests, personal jealousies,
small and individual conceptions. Whether other men
see with his eyes or not, he must forever try to see with
their eyes. Whether his clergy and his people under-
stand and love him, he must be always trying to under-
stand and love them. And if he does, what opportunity
opens before him ! It is easy enough in one way to
narrow and limit the Episcopate, to exaggerate its pre-
rogatives and minimize its obligations, to stiffen its
ministry into a hard and dry routine, and its personality
into the speech and the manners of a martinet. It is
easy for a bishop to concern himself exclusively with the
mint and anise and cummin of rite and rubric and
canon, and when he does not do this, there will be those
who will be swift to tell him not to go above his ap-
pointed round nor to waste his strength in other than
the task-work of his office. But if he refuses to be
fettered by any such narrow construction of his conse-
cration vows as that, then as he hearkens to those
affectino words with which presently this our brother
will be addressed, " Be to the flock of Christ a shepherd.

380 Way marks.

not a wolf ; feed them, devour them not. Hold up the
weak, heal the sick, bind up the broken, bring again the
outcast, seek the lost," how wide and how effectual is
the door which they hold open ! The world waits, my
brothers, for men who carry their Lord's heart in their
breasts, and who will lay their hands on the heads of
His erring ones with His own infinite tenderness. And
he will best do that work who comes to it with widest
vision and with largest love.

And so our act to-day becomes at once consistent and
prophetic. I can well understand the grief and dismay
with which not alone this congregation but this com-
munity, nor only these but with them other multitudes
in both hemispheres and of various fellowships, must
contemplate the act which takes out of this pulpit one
whose teaching and whose life have been to uncounted
hearts so true a message of hope and courage. I can no
less easily understand the doubt and apprehension with
which those who have most largely profited by them will
see exceptional powers turned from their wonted and
fruitful channels to other and untried tasks. But never-
theless I am persuaded that in parting from this our
brother, whom you, his people, now give to his larger
work, you are losing him only to find him anew. God
has yet other and greater work for him to do, believe
me, or He would not have called him to it. This fair
and ancient city, this great State with its teeming
towns and villages, when has there been a time in
the progress of our national history when they have
not left their impress, clear and strong and enduring,

Mission and Commission. 381

upon all our noblest policies ! To leave New England
out of the history of this republic, or Massachusetts out
of the history of New England, would be to leaA'e much
of its best and most potential life out of the history of
both. And w^e may w^ell rejoice, therefore, and you
especially of this venerable parish, that it is your rare
privilege to give so choice a gift to that larger constit-
uency to which now your minister goes. You know
better than I can tell you how close you will always
be to him ; and you will not refuse, I am persuaded,
to yield him to that wider parish which is not bounded
even by the boundaries of this ancient and historic
Commonwealth !

And you, my brother, soon to be a brother in a dearer
and holier bond, what can I trust myself to say to you ?
I wonder if you can recall as vividly as I the day when
first we met, — the old seminary at Alexandria, the
simple but manly life there, our talks, with fit compan-
ionship though few, the room in the wilderness, the
Chapel and Prayer Hall, Sparrow and May and the dear
old " Rab," and all the rest I How it comes back again
out of the mist, and how the long tale of years that
stretch between seem but the shadow of a dream ! Your
privilege and mine it w^as to begin our ministries under
the Episcopate of one whose gifts and character I re-
joice to believe you prized and loved as I did. I have
been told (I do not know how true it is) that you have
said that one thing which reconciled you to attempting
the work of a bishop was that you would like to try and
be such a bishop as he was. Am 1 blinded by filial

382 Waymarks,

affection when I say that I believe you have set before
you no unworthy model ? and may I tell this people,
though I know well how your rare humility will resent
it, how profoundly I am persuaded that, succeeding, as
you do, one who has given you a noble example of entire
devotion to duty, every best attribute of the Episcopate
will find in you its worthy illustration ? Whatever have
been the limitations of your sympathy heretofore, I
know that you will henceforth seek to widen its range
and enlarge its unfailing activities, and taking with you
that singular and invariable magnanimity which, under
the sorest provocation, has made it impossible to nourish
a resentment or to remember an injustice, you will, I
know too, show to the people of your charge that yours
is a charity born not of indifference but of love, — for
Christ, for your clergy, and for your flock. He who has
endowed you with many exceptional gifts has given you
one, I think, which is best among them all. It is not
learning, nor eloquence, nor generosity, nor insight, nor
the tidal rush of impassioned feeling which will most
effectually turn the dark places in men's hearts to light,
but that enkindling and transforming temper wliich for-
ever sees in humanity, not that which is bad and hateful,
but that which is lovable and redeemable, — that nobler
longing of the soul which is the indestructible image of
its Maker. It is this — this enduring belief in the re-
deemable qualities of the vilest manhood — which is the
most potent spell in the ministry of Christ, and which
as it seems to me you have never for an instant lost out
of yours !

Mission and Commission. 383

Go with it, then, my brother, to the large tasks and
larger flock that now await you. We who know and
love you, through and through, thank God for this gift
to the Episcop'ate ; and not least do we thank Him for
all the graces of uncomplaining patience, and self-re-
specting humility, and utter absence of all bitterness
and wrath and anger and clamor and evil-speaking
which have shone in you in such rare and unfailing
constancy. If there are those who to-day misread you,
we are persuaded that they will not do so long. And
for yourself, believe me, these, your clergy and your
people as they are henceforth to be, who, of whatever
school or opinion, greet you, one and all to-day, as you
take on this your high office, with such undivided love
and loyalty, — these will prove to you how warm is the
place in all their hearts to which they wait to welcome
you ! May God in giving you their love give you no
less their prayers, and so the grace and courage that
you will always need ! How heavy the load, how great
the task, and above all, for that I think is the bitterest
element in a bishop's life, how inexpressibly lonely the
way ! And yet, said one whose office, as an Apostle
describes it, is that of " the Bishop and Shepherd of our
souls," — and yet " I am not alone because the Father
is with me." May He go with you always even to the
glorious end !

THE END.

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