A RETROSPECT, CONTINUED.
As I look over the changes that half a century has wrought in the social
life of my beloved country, I see some which awaken satisfaction--others
which are not so exhilarating. The enormous and rapid increase of wealth
is unparalleled in human history. In my boyhood, millionaires were rare;
there were hardly a score of them in any one of our cities. The two
typical rich men were Stephen Girard in Philadelphia and John Jacob
Astor in New York; and their whole fortunes were not equal to the annual
income of several of the rich men of to-day. Some of our present
millionaires are reservoirs of munificence, and the outflow builds
churches, hospitals, asylums, and endows libraries--and sends broad
streams of charity through places parched by destitution and suffering.
Others are like pools at the base of a hill--they receive the inflow of
every descending streamlet or shower, and stagnate into selfishness.
Wealth is a tremendous trust; it becomes a dangerous one when it owns
its owner. Our Brooklyn philanthropist, the late Mr. Charles Pratt, once
said to me: "There is no greater humbug than the idea that the mere
possession of wealth makes any man happy. I never got any happiness out
of mine until I began to do good with it."
To the faithful steward there is a perpetual reward of good stewardship.
No investments yield a more covetable dividend than those made in gifts
of public beneficence. When Mr. Morris K. Jesup drives through New York
his eyes are gladdened in one street by the "Dewitt Memorial Chapel"
that he erected; in another by the Five Points House of Industry, of
which he is the president, and in still others by the Young Men's
Christian Association and kindred institutions, of which he is a liberal
supporter.
Mr. John D. Rockefeller is reputed to have an annual income equal to
that of three or four foreign sovereigns; but his inalienable assets are
in the universities he has endowed, the churches he has helped to build,
the useful societies he has aided, and in the gold mines of public
gratitude which he has opened up.
Many of our most munificent millionaires have been the architects of
their own fortunes. It is most commonly (with some happy exceptions) the
earned wealth, and not the inherited wealth that is bestowed most
freely for the public benefit. The Hon. William E. Dodge once stated in
a popular lecture that he began his career as a boy on a salary of fifty
dollars a year, and his board--part of his duty being to sweep out the
store in which he was employed. He lived to distribute a thousand
dollars a day to Christian missions, and otherwise objects of
benevolence.
There are old men in Pittsburg (or were, not long ago), who remember the
bright Scotch lad, Andrew Carnegie, to whom they used to give a dime for
bringing telegraph messages from the office in which he was employed.
The benefits which he then derived from the use of a free library in
that city, have added to his good impulse, to create such a vast number
of libraries in many lands that his honored name throws into the shade
the names of Bodley and Radcliffe in England, and that of Astor in
America. The mention of this latter name tempts me to narrate an amusing
story of old John Jacob Astor, the founder of the fortune of that
family, and a man who was more noted for acquiring money than for giving
it away for any purpose. Mr. Astor came to New York a poor young man.
His wealth consisted mainly in real estate, which he purchased at an
early day. When the New York and Erie Railroad was projected (it was the
first one ever coming directly into New York), my friend, Judge Joseph
Hoxie, called on Mr. Astor to subscribe to the stock, telling him that
it would add to the value of his real estate. "What do I care for that?"
said the shrewd old German, "I never sells, I only buys." "Well," said
Judge Hoxie, "your son, William, has subscribed for several shares." "He
can do that," was the chuckling reply, "he has got a rich father." It is
a fair problem how many such possessors of real estate it would take to
build up the prosperity of a great city.
There is one temptation to which great wealth has sometimes subjected
its possessors, which demands from me a word of patriotic protest. It is
the temptation to use it for political advancement. No fact is more
patent than the painful one that some ambitious men have secured public
offices, and even bought their way into legislative bodies, by the
abundancies of their purses united to skill in manipulating partisan
machines. This is a most serious menace to honest popular government. It
is one of the very worst forms of a plutocracy. I often think that if
Webster and Clay and Calhoun and John Quincy Adams and Sumner and some
other giants of a former era could enter the Congressional halls of our
day, they might paraphrase the words of Holy Writ and exclaim: "Take the
money-changers hence, and make not the temple of a nation's legislation
a house of merchandise."
Foreign travel is no longer the novelty that it was once, and many
wealthy folk spend much of their time abroad since the Atlantic Ocean
has been reduced to a ferry. This growth of European travel has brought
its increment of information and culture; but, with new ideas from
abroad, have come also some new notions and usages that were better left
behind. A prohibitory tariff in that direction would "protect" some of
the unostentatiousness of social life that befits a republican people.
No young man or woman, who desires to attain proficience in any
department of scholarship, classical or scientific, need to betake
themselves to the universities of Europe. Those universities have come
to us in the shape of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell and our other
most richly endowed institutions of learning for both sexes.
Quite too much of the social life of our country is more artificial than
formerly, and one result is the growing passion for publicity. Plenty of
ambitious people "make their beds in the face of the sun." Many things
are now chronicled in the press that were formerly kept behind the
closed doors of the home. The details of a dinner or a social company at
the fireside become the topics for the gossip of strangers. I sometimes
think that the young people of the present day lose much of the romance
that used to belong to the halcyon period of courtship. In the somewhat
primitive days of my youth, young lovers kept their own secrets, and
were startled if their heart affairs were on other people's tongues; but
now-a-days marriage engagements are matters of public announcement--not
infrequently in the columns of a newspaper! It seems to be forgotten
that an engagement to marry may not always end in a marriage. The usage
of crowned heads abroad is no warrant for the new fashion, for royalty
has no privacies, and queens and empresses choose their own husbands--a
prerogative that the stoutest champion of woman's rights has not yet had
the hardihood to advocate.
It has always required--but never more than now--no small amount of
moral courage on the part of newly married couples, whose incomes are
moderate, to resist the temptations of extravagant living. As the heads
of young men are often turned by the reports of great fortunes suddenly
acquired, so the ambition seizes upon many a young wife to cut a figure
in "society." Instead of "the household--motions light and free" that
Wordsworth describes, the handmaid of fashion leads the hollow life of
"keeping up appearances." If nothing worse than the slavery of debt is
incurred, home life becomes a counterfeit of happiness; but any one who
watches the daily papers will sometimes see obituaries there more
saddening than those which appear under the head of "Deaths," it is the
list of detected defaulters or peculators or swindlers of some
description--often belonging to the most respectable families. While the
ruin of those evil-doers is sometimes caused by club life or dissipated
habits, yet, in a large number of cases, the temptation to fraud has
been the snare of extravagant living.
In my long experience as a city pastor I have watched the careers of
thousands of married pairs. One class have begun modestly in an
unfashionable locality with plain dress and frugal expenditure They have
eaten the wholesome bread of independence. I wish that every young woman
would display the good sense of a friend of mine, who received an offer
of marriage from a very intelligent and very industrious, but poor young
man who said to her: "I hear that you have offers of marriage from young
men of wealth; all that I can offer you is a good name, sincere love and
plain lodgings at first in a boarding house." She was wise enough to
discover the "jewel in the leaden casket" and accept his hand. He became
a prosperous business man and an officer of my church. As for the other
class, who begin their domestic career by a pitiable craze to "get into
society" and to keep up with their "set" in the vain show, is their fate
not written in the chronicles of haggard and jaded wives, and of
husbands drowned in debt or driven perhaps to stock-gambling or some
other refuge of desperation?
In another portion of this autobiography I have uttered a prayer for the
revival of soul-kindling eloquence in the pulpit. In this age of dizzy
ballooning in finance and social extravagance, my prayer is: "Oh, for
the revival of old fashioned, sturdy, courageous frugality that 'hath
clean hands and a clean heart, and hath not lifted up its soul to
vanity!'"
"Do you not discover a great advance in educational facilities and in
the enlargement of means to popular knowledge?" To this question I am
happy to give an affirmative reply. Schools and universities are more
richly endowed and our public schools have been greatly improved in many
directions. Among the educated classes, reading clubs and societies for
discussing sociological questions are more numerous, and so are free
lectures among the humbler classes. Books have been multiplied--and at
cheaper prices--to an enormous extent. In my childhood, books adapted to
the reach of children numbered not more than a score or two; now they
are multiplied to a degree that is almost bewildering to the youthful
mind. Newspapers printed for them, such as the _Youth's Companion_ and
the National Society's _Temperance Banner_, were then utterly unknown.
The sacred writer of the ecclesiastics needs not to tell the people of
this generation: "That of making many books there is no end."
It is not, however, a matter for congratulation that so large a portion
of the volumes that are most read are works of fiction. In most of our
public libraries the novels called for are far in excess of all the
other books. Let any one scrutinize the advertising columns of literary
journals, and he will see that the only startling figures are those
which announce the enormous sale of popular works of fiction. I am not
uttering a tirade against any book simply because it is fictitious. Our
Divine Master spoke often in parables; Bunyan's matchless allegories
have guided multitudes of pilgrims towards the Celestial City. Fiction
in the clean hands of that king of romancers, Sir Walter Scott, threw
new light on the history and scenes of the past. Such characters as
"Jennie Deans" and her godly father might have been taken from John
Banyan's portrait gallery; Lady Di Vernon is the ideal of young
womanhood. Fiction has often been a wholesome relief to a good man's
overworked and weary brain. Many of the recent popular novels are
wholesome in their tone and the historical type often instructive. The
chief objection to the best of them is that they excite a distaste in
the minds of thousands for any other reading. Exclusive reading of
fiction is to any one's mind just what highly spiced food and alcoholic
stimulants are to the body. The increasing rage for novel reading
betokens both a famine in the intellect, and a serious peril to the
mental and spiritual life. The honest truth is that quite too large a
number of fictitious works are subtle poison. The plots of some of the
most popular novels turn on the sexual relation and the violation in
some form of the seventh commandment. They kindle evil passions; they
varnish and veneer vice; they deride connubial purity; they uncover what
ought to be hid, and paint in attractive hues what never ought to be
seen by any pure eye or named by any modest tongue. Another objection to
many of the most advertised works of fiction is that they deal with the
sacred themes of religion in a very mischievous and misleading manner. A
few popular writers of fiction present evangelical religion in its
winning features; they preach with the pen the same truths that they
preach from the pulpit. Two of the perils that threaten American youths
are a licentious stage and a poisonous literature. A highly intelligent
lady, who has examined many of the novels printed during the last
decade, said to me: "The main purpose of many of these books is to knock
away the underpinning of the marriage relation or of the Bible." If
parents give house room to trashy or corrupt books, they cannot be
surprised if their children give heart-room to "the world, the flesh,
and the evil one." When interesting and profitable books are so abundant
and so cheap, this increasing rage for novels is to me one of the
sinister signs of the times.
Within the last two or three decades there has been a most marked change
as to the directions in which the human intellect has exerted its
highest activities. This change is especially marked in the literature
of the two great English-speaking nations. For example, there are now in
Great Britain no poets who are the peers of Wordsworth, Tennyson and
Browning;--no brilliant essayists who are the peers of Carlyle and
Macaulay, and no novelists who are the peers of Scott, Dickens and
Thackeray. In the United States we have no poets who are a match for
Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier and Holmes; and no essayists who are a
match for Emerson and James Russell Lowell--no jurists who are the
rivals of Marshall, Kent and Story; and no living historians equal
Bancroft, Prescott and Motley. These facts do not necessarily indicate
(as some assert) a widespread intellectual famine. The most probable
explanation of the fact is that the mental forces in our day exert
themselves in other directions. This is an age of scientific research
and scientific achievement. It is an age of material advancement, and in
those lines in which the human mind can "seek out many inventions." The
whole trend of human thought is under transformation. In ancient days
"a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon thick trees."
The man is famous now who makes some useful mechanical invention, or
explores some unknown territory, or bridges the oceans with swift
steamers, or belts the earth with new railways, or organizes powerful
financial combinations. If the law of demand and supply is as applicable
to mental products as it is to the imports of commerce, then we may
readily understand that the realm of the ideal, which was ruled by the
Wordsworths, Carlyles and Longfellows, should be supplanted by a realm
in which the master minds should be political economists, or explorers,
or railway kings, or financial magnates, or empire-builders of some
description. The philosophical and poetical yield to the practical, when
"_cui bono?_" is the lest question which challenges all comers. This
change, if it be an actual one, may bring its losses as well as its
gains. We are thankful for all the precious boons which inventive genius
has brought to us--for telegraphs, and telephones, and photographic
arts, for steam engines and electric motors, for power presses and
sewing machines, for pain-killing chloroform, and the splendid
achievements of skillful surgery. But the mind has its necessities as
well as the body; and we hope and pray that the human intellect may
never be so busy in materialistic inventions that it cannot give us an
"Ode to Duty," and a "Happy Warrior," a "Snow Bound," and a
"Thanatopsis," an "Evangeline" and a "Chambered Nautilus," a "Pippa
Passes" or a "Biglow Papers," an "In Memoriam" or a "Locksley Hall."
One characteristic of the present time is the radical and revolutionary
spirit which condemns everything that is "old," especially in the realm
of religion. It arrogantly claims that the "advanced thought" of this
highly cultured age has broken with the traditional beliefs of our
benighted ancestors, and that modern congregations are too highly
enlighted to accept those antiquated theologies. No pretentions could be
more preposterous. Methinks that those stalwart farmers of New England,
who on a wintry Sabbath, sat and eagerly devoured for an hour the strong
meat of such theological giants as Jonathan Edwards, and Emmons and
Bellamy and Dwight, would laugh to scorn the ridiculous assumption of
the present day congregations, many of whom have fed on little else
during the week but novels and newspapers. This revolutionary spirit is
expert in pulling down; it is a sorry bungler at rebuilding. Nothing is
too sacred for its assaults. The iconoclasts who belong to the most
extreme and destructive school of "higher criticism" have reduced a
large portion of God's revealed word utterly to tatters. King David has
been exiled from the Psalter; but no "sweet singers" have yet turned up
who could have composed those matchless minstrelsies. Paul is denied the
authorship of the Epistle to the Romans; but the mighty mind has not
been discovered which produced what Coleridge called the "profoundest
book in existence." The Scripture miracles are discarded, but
Christianity, which is the greatest miracle of all, is not accounted
for. The "new theology" which has well nigh banished the supernatural
from the Bible pays an homage to the principle of "evolution," which is
due only to the Almighty Creator of the universe. Spurgeon has wittily
said that if we are not the product of God's creating hand, but are only
the advanced descendants of the ape, then we ought to conduct our
devotions accordingly, and address our daily petitions "not to our
Father which is in Heaven, but to our father which is up a tree."
I do not belong to that class which is irreverently styled "old fogies,"
for I hold that genuine conservatism consists in healthful and regular
progress; and it has been my privilege to take an active part in a great
many reformatory movements; yet I am more warmly hospitable to a truth
which has stood the test of time and of trial. There are many things in
this world that are improved by age. Friendship is one of them, and I
have found that it takes a great many new friends to make an old one.
My Bible is all the dearer to me, not only because it has pillowed the
dying heads of my father and my mother, but because it has been the sure
guide of a hundred generations of Christians before them. When the
boastful innovators offer me a new system of belief (which is really a
congeries of unbeliefs) I say to them: "the old is better." Twenty
centuries of experience shared by such intellects as Augustine, Luther,
Pascal, Calvin, Newton, Chalmers, Edwards, Wesley and Spurgeon are not
to be shaken by the assaults of men, who often contradict each other
while contradicting God's truth. We have tested a supernaturally
inspired Bible for ourselves. As my eloquent and much loved friend, Dr.
McLaren, of Manchester has finely said: "We decline to dig up the piles
of the bridge that carries us over the abyss because some voices tell us
that it is rotten. It is perfectly reasonable to answer, 'We have tried
the bridge and it bears.' Which, being translated into less simple
language, is just the assertion of certitude, built on facts and
experience, which leaves no place for doubt. All the opposition will be
broken into spray against this rock-bulwark: 'Thy words were found, and
I did eat them, and they are the joy and rejoicing of my heart.'"