1856-1862
My first sermons were to me the most tremendous endeavours of my life,
because I felt the awful responsibility of standing in a pulpit, knowing
that a great many people would be influenced by what I said concerning
God, or the soul, or the great future.
When I first began to preach, I was very cautious lest I should be
misrepresented, and guarded the subject on all sides. I got beyond that
point. I found that I got on better when, without regard to
consequences, I threw myself upon the hearts and consciences of my
hearers.
In those early days of my pastoral experience I saw how men reason
themselves into scepticism. I knew what it was to have a hundred nights
poured into one hour.
I remember one infidel book in the possession of my student companion.
He said, "DeWitt, would you like to read that book?" "Well," said I, "I
would like to look at it." I read it a little while. I said to him, "I
dare not read that book; you had better destroy it. I give you my
advice, you had better destroy it. I dare not read that book. I have
read enough of it." "Oh," he said, "haven't you a stronger mind than
that? Can't you read a book you don't exactly believe, and not be
affected by it?" I said, "You had better destroy it." He kept it. He
read it until he gave up the Bible; his belief in the existence of a
God, his good morals; until body, mind and soul were ruined--and he went
into the insane asylum. I read too much of it. I read about fifteen or
twenty pages of it. I wish I had never read it. It never did me any
good; it did me harm. I have often struggled with what I read in that
book. I rejected it, I denounced it, I cast it out with infinite scorn,
I hated it; yet sometimes its caricature of good and its eulogium of
evil have troubled me.
With supreme gratitude, therefore, I remember the wonderful impression
made upon me, when I was a young man, of the presence of a consecrated
human being in the pulpit.
It was a Sabbath evening in spring at "The Trinity Methodist Church,"
Jersey City. Rev. William P. Corbit, the pastor of that church, in
compliment to my relatives, who attended upon his services, invited me
to preach for him. I had only a few months before entered the Gospel
ministry, and had come in from my village settlement to occupy a place
in the pulpit of the great Methodist orator. In much trepidation on my
part I entered the church with Mr. Corbit, and sat trembling in the
corner of the "sacred desk," waiting for the moment to begin the
service. A crowded audience had assembled to hear the pastor of that
church preach, and the disappointment I was about to create added to my
embarrassment.
The service opened, and the time came to offer the prayer before sermon.
I turned to Mr. Corbit and said, "I wish you would lead in prayer." He
replied, "No! sharpen your own knife!" The whole occasion was to me
memorable for its agitations. But there began an acquaintanceship that
became more and more endearing and ardent as the years went by. After he
ceased, through the coming on of the infirmities of age, to occupy a
pulpit of his own, he frequented my church on the Sabbaths, and our
prayer-meetings during the week. He was the most powerful exhorter I
ever heard. Whatever might be the intensity of interest in a revival
service, he would in a ten minute address augment it. I never heard him
deliver a sermon except on two occasions, and those during my boyhood;
but they made lasting impressions upon me. I do not remember the texts
or the ideas, but they demonstrated the tremendous reality of spiritual
and eternal things, and showed possibilities in religious address that I
had never known or imagined.
He was so unique in manners, in pulpit oratory, and in the entire type
of his nature, that no one will ever be able to describe what he was.
Those who saw and heard him the last ten or fifteen years of his
decadence can have no idea of his former power as a preacher of the
Gospel.
There he is, as I first saw him! Eye like a hawk's. Hair long and
straight as a Chippewa Indian's. He was not straight as an arrow, for
that suggests something too fragile and short, but more like a
column--not only straight, but tall and majestic, and capable of holding
any weight, and without fatigue or exertion. When he put his foot down,
either literally of figuratively, it was down. Vacillation, or fear, or
incertitude, or indecision, were strangers to whom he would never be
introduced. When he entered a room you were, to use a New Testament
phrase, "exceedingly filled with his company."
He was as affectionate as a woman to those whom he liked, and cold as
Greenland to those whose principles were an affront. He was not only a
mighty speaker, but a mighty listener. I do not know how any man could
speak upon any important theme, standing in his presence, without being
set on fire by his alert sympathy.
But he has vanished from mortal sight. What the resurrection will do for
him I cannot say. If those who have only ordinary stature and
unimpressive physique in this world are at the last to have bodies
resplendent and of supernal potency, what will the unusual corporiety of
William P. Corbit become? In his case the resurrection will have unusual
material to start with. If a sculptor can mould a handsome form out of
clay, what can he not put out of Parian marble? If the blast of the
trumpet which wakes the dead rouses life-long invalidism and emaciation
into athletic celestialism, what will be the transfiguration when the
sound of final reanimation touches the ear of those sleeping giants
among the trees and fountains of Greenwood?
Good-bye, great and good and splendid soul! Good-bye, till we meet
again! I will look around for you as soon as I come, if through the
pardoning grace of Christ I am so happy as to reach the place of your
destination. Meet me at the gate of the city; or under the tree of life
on the bank of the river; or just inside of the door of the House of
Many Mansions; or in the hall of the Temple which has no need of stellar
or lunar or solar illumination, "For the Lamb is the Light thereof."
After three years of grace and happiness at Belleville I accepted a call
to a church in Syracuse. My pastorate there, in the very midst of its
most uplifting crisis, was interrupted, as I believe, by Divine orders.
The ordeal of deciding anything important in my life has always been a
desperate period of anxiety. I never have really decided for myself. God
has told me what to do. The first great crisis of this sort came to me
in Syracuse. While living there I received a pastoral call from the
Second Reformed Church of Philadelphia. Six weeks of agony followed.
I was about 30 years of age. The thick shock of hair with which I had
been supplied, in those six weeks was thinned out to its present
scarcity. My church in Syracuse was made up of as delightful people as
ever came together; but I felt that the climate of Philadelphia would be
better adapted to my health, and so I was very anxious to go. But a
recent revival in my Syracuse Church, and a movement at that time on
foot for extensive repairs of our building, made the question of my
leaving for another pastorate very doubtful. Six weeks of sleeplessness
followed. Every morning I combed out handfuls of hair as the result of
the nervous agitation. Then I decided to stay, and never expected to
leave those kind parishioners of Syracuse.
A year afterward the call from Philadelphia was repeated, and all the
circumstances having changed, I went. But I learned, during those six
weeks of uncertainty about going from Syracuse to Philadelphia, a lesson
I shall never forget, and a lesson that might be useful to others in
like crisis: namely, that it is one's duty to stay where you are until
God makes it evident that you should move.
In all my life I never had one streak of good luck. But I have had a
good God watching and guiding me.
While I was living in Syracuse I delivered my first lecture. It was a
literary lecture. My ideas of a literary lecture are very much changed
from what they used to be. I used to think that a lecture ought to be
something very profound. I began with three or four lectures of that
kind in stock. My first lecture audience was in a patient community of
the town of Hudson, N.Y. All my addresses previously had been literary.
I had made speeches on literature and patriotism, and sometimes filled
the gaps when in lecture courses speakers announced failed to arrive.
But the first paid lecture was at Hudson. The fifty dollars which I
received for it seemed immense. Indeed it was the extreme price paid
anyone in those days. It was some years later in life that I got into
the lecturing field. It was always, however, subordinate to my chief
work of preaching the Gospel.
Syracuse in 1859 was the West. I felt there all the influences that are
now western. Now there is no West left. They have chased it into the
Pacific Ocean.
In 1862 I accepted a call to the Second Reformed Church of Philadelphia.
What remembrances come to me, looking backward to this period of our
terrific national carnalism! I shall never forget the first time I ever
saw Abraham Lincoln. We followed into his room, at the White House, a
committee that had come to Washington to tell the President how to
conduct the war. The saddest-looking man I ever saw was Abraham Lincoln.
He had a far-away look while he stood listening to an address being made
to him by one of the committee, as though beyond and far and wide he
could see the battlefields and hospitals and conflagrations of national
bereavement. One of our party asked for his autograph; he cheerfully
gave it, asking, "Is that all I can do for you?" He was at that time
the most abused man in America.
I remember the alarm in Philadelphia when General Lee's army invaded
Pennsylvania. Merchants sent their goods quietly to New York. Residents
hid their valuables. A request for arms was made at the arsenals, and
military companies were organised. Preachers appealed to the men in
their congregations, organised companies, engaged a drill sergeant, and
carried on daily drills in the yards adjoining their churches.
In the regiment I joined for a short time there were many clergymen. It
was the most awkward squad of men ever got together. We drilled a week
or two, and then disbanded. Whether General Lee heard of the formation
of our regiment or not I cannot say, but he immediately retreated across
the Potomac.
There were in Philadelphia and its vicinity many camps of prisoners of
war, hospitals for the sick and wounded. Waggon trains of supplies for
the soldiers were constantly passing through the streets. I was
privileged to be of some service in the field to the Christian
Commission. With Dr. Brainerd and Samuel B. Falls I often performed some
duty at the Cooper shop; while with George H. Stuart and George T.
Merigens I invited other cities to make appeals for money to forward the
great work of the Secretary and Christian Commissions. In our churches
we were constantly busy getting up entertainments and fairs to help
those rendered destitute by the loss of fathers and brothers in the
field.
Just before the battle of Gettysburg a long procession of clergymen,
headed by Dr. Brainerd, marched to Fairmount Park with spades over their
shoulders to throw up entrenchments. The victory of the Federal troops
at Vicksburg and Gettysburg rendered those earthworks unnecessary.
A distinguished gentleman of the Civil War told me that Abraham Lincoln
proposed to avoid our civil conflict by purchasing the slaves of the
South and setting them free. He calculated what would be a reasonable
price for them, and when the number of millions of dollars that would be
required for such a purpose was announced the proposition was scouted,
and the North would not have made the offer, and the South would not
have accepted it, if made.
"But," said my military friend, "the war went on, and just the number of
million dollars that Mr. Lincoln calculated would have been enough to
make a reasonable purchase of all the slaves were spent in war, besides
all the precious lives that were hurled away in 250 battles."
There ought to be some other way for men to settle their controversies
without wholesale butchering.
It was due partly to the national gloom that overspread the people
during the Civil War that I took to the lecture platform actively. I
entered fully into the lecturing field when I went to Philadelphia,
where DeWitt Moore, officer in my church and a most intimate friend,
asked me to lecture for the benefit of a Ball Club to which he belonged.
That lecture in a hall in Locust Street, Philadelphia, opened the way
for more than I could do as lecturer.
I have always made such engagements subordinate to my chief work of
preaching the Gospel. Excepting two long journeys a year, causing each
an absence of two Sundays, I have taken no lecturing engagements, except
one a week, generally Thursdays. Lecturing has saved my life and
prolonged my work. It has taken me from an ever-ringing door-bell, and
freshened me for work, railroad travelling being to me a recuperation.
I have lectured in nearly all the cities of the United States, Canada,
England, Ireland and Scotland, and in most of them many times. The
prices paid me have seemed too large, but my arrangements have generally
been made through bureaus, and almost invariably local committees have
cleared money. The lecture platform seemed to me to offer greater
opportunity for usefulness. Things that could not be said in the pulpit,
but which ought to be said, may be said on the lyceum platform. And
there was so much that had to be said then, to encourage, to cheer, to
brighten, to illumine the sorrow and bereavement. From the first I
regarded my lecture tours as an annex to my church. The lecture platform
has been to me a pastoral visitation. It has given me an opportunity of
meeting hundreds of thousands of people to whom, through the press, I
have for many years administered the Gospel.
People have often asked me how much money I received for my lectures.
The amounts have been a great surprise to me, often.
For many years I have been paid from $400 to $1,000 a lecture. The
longer the journey the bigger the fee usually. The average remuneration
was about $500 a night. In Cleveland and in Cincinnati I received $750.
In Chicago, $1,000. Later I was offered $6,000 for six lectures in
Chicago, to be delivered one a month, during the World's Fair, but I
declined them.
My expenses in many directions have been enormous, and without a large
income for lectures I could not have done many things which I felt it
important to do. I have always been under obligation to the press.
Sometimes it has not intended to help me, but it has, being hard pressed
for news.
During the Civil War, when news was sufficiently exciting for the most
ambitious journalist, they used to come to my church for a copy of my
Sermons. News in those days was pretty accurate, but it sometimes went
wrong.
On a Sabbath night, at the close of a preaching service in Philadelphia,
a reporter of one of the prominent newspapers came into my study
adjoining the pulpit and asked of me a sketch of the sermon just
delivered, as he had been sent to take it, but had been unavoidably
detained. His mind did not seem to be very clear, but I dictated to him
about a column of my sermon. He had during the afternoon or evening been
attending a meeting of the Christian Commission for raising funds for
the hospitals, and ex-Governor Pollock had been making a speech. The
reporter had that speech of the ex-Governor of Pennsylvania in his hand,
and had the sketch of my sermon in the same bundle of reportorial notes.
He opened the door to depart and said, "Good evening," and I responded,
"Good evening." The way out from my study to the street was through a
dark alley across which a pump handle projected to an unreasonable
extent. "Look out for that pump handle," I said, "or you may get hurt."
But the warning did not come soon enough. I heard the collision and then
a hard fall, and a rustle of papers, and a scramble, and then some words
of objurgation at the sudden overthrow.
There was no portable light that I could take to his assistance. Beside
that, I was as much upset with cruel laughter as the reporter had been
by the pump handle. In this state of helplessness I shut the door. But
the next morning newspaper proved how utter had been the discomfiture
and demoralisation of my journalistic friend. He put my sermon under the
name of ex-Governor Pollock at the meeting of the Christian Commission,
and he made my discourse begin with the words, "When I was Governor of
Pennsylvania."
Never since John Gutenberg invented the art of printing was there such a
riot of types or such mixing up of occasions. Philadelphia went into a
brown study as to what it all meant, and the more the people read of
ex-Governor Pollock's speech and of my sermon of the night before, the
more they were stunned by the stroke of that pump handle.
But it was soon forgotten--everything is. The memory of man is poor. All
the talk about the country never forgetting those who fought for it is
an untruth. It does forget. Picture how veterans of the war sometimes
had to turn the hand-organs on the streets of Philadelphia to get a
living for their families! How ruthlessly many of them have been turned
out of office that some bloat of a politician might take their place!
The fact is, there is not a man or woman under thirty years of age, who,
born before the war, has any full appreciation of the four years
martyrdom of 1861 to 1865, inclusive. I can scarcely remember, and yet I
still feel the pressure of domestic calamity that overshadowed the
nation then.
Since things have been hardened, as was the guardsman in the Crimean War
who heartlessly wrote home to his mother: "I do not want to see any more
crying letters come to the Crimea from you. Those I have received I have
put into my rifle, after loading it, and have fired them at the
Russians, because you appear to have a strong dislike of them. If you
had seen as many killed as I have you would not have as many weak ideas
as you now have."
After the War came a period of great national rejoicing. I shall never
forget, in the summer of 1869, a great national peace jubilee was held
in Boston, and DeWitt Moore, an elder of my church, had been honoured by
the selection of some of his music to be rendered on that occasion. I
accompanied him to the jubilee. Forty thousand people sat and stood in
the great Colosseum erected for that purpose. Thousands of wind and
stringed instruments; twelve thousand trained voices! The masterpieces
of all ages rendered, hour after hour, and day after day--Handel's
"Judas Maccabæus," Spohr's "Last Judgment," Beethoven's "Mount of
Olives," Haydn's "Creation," Mendelssohn's "Elijah," Meyerbeer's
"Coronation March," rolling on and up in surges that billowed against
the heavens! The mighty cadences within were accompanied on the outside
by the ringing of the bells of the city, and cannon on the common, in
exact time with the music, discharged by electricity, thundering their
awful bars of a harmony that astounded all nations. Sometimes I bowed my
head and wept. Sometimes I stood up in the enchantment, and sometimes
the effect was so overpowering I felt I could not endure it.
When all the voices were in full chorus, and all the batons in full
wave, and all the orchestra in full triumph, and a hundred anvils under
mighty hammers were in full clang, and all the towers of the city rolled
in their majestic sweetness, and the whole building quaked with the boom
of thirty cannon, Parepa Rosa, with a voice that will never again be
equalled on earth until the archangelic voice proclaims that time shall
be no longer, rose above all other sounds in her rendering of our
national air, the "Star Spangled Banner." It was too much for a mortal,
and quite enough for an immortal, to hear: and while some fainted, one
womanly spirit, released under its power, sped away to be with God. It
was a marvel of human emotion in patriotic frenzy.
Immediately following the Civil War there was a great wave of
intemperance, and bribery swept over our land. The temptation to
intemperance in public places grew more and more terrific. Of the men
who were prominent in political circles but few died respectably. The
majority among them died of delirium tremens. The doctor usually fixed
up the case for the newspapers, and in his report to them it was usually
gout, or rheumatism, or obstruction of the liver, or exhaustion from
patriotic services--but we all knew it was whiskey. That which smote the
villain in the dark alley smote down the great orator and the great
legislator. The one you wrapped in a rough cloth, and pushed into a
rough coffin, and carried out in a box waggon, and let him down into a
pauper's grave, without a prayer or a benediction. Around the other
gathered the pomp of the land; and lordly men walked with uncovered
heads beside the hearse tossing with plumes on the way to a grave to be
adorned with a white marble shaft, all four sides covered with eulogium.
The one man was killed by logwood rum at two cents a glass, the other by
a beverage three dollars a bottle. I write both their epitaphs. I write
the one epitaph with my lead pencil on the shingle over the pauper's
grave; I write the other epitaph with a chisel, cutting on the white
marble of the senator: "Slain by strong drink." The time came when
dissipation was no longer a hindrance to office in this country. Did we
not at one time have a Secretary of the United States carried home dead
drunk? Did we not have a Vice-President sworn in so intoxicated the
whole land hid its head in shame? Judges and jurors and attorneys
sometimes tried important cases by day, and by night caroused together
in iniquity.
During the war whiskey had done its share in disgracing manhood. What
was it that defeated the armies sometimes in the late war? Drunkenness
in the saddle! What mean those graves on the heights of Fredericksburg?
As you go to Richmond you see them. Drunkenness in the saddle. In place
of the bloodshed of war, came the deformations of character,
libertinism!
Again and again it was demonstrated that impurity walked under the
chandeliers of the mansion, and dozed on damask upholstery. In Albany,
in Harrisburg, in Trenton, in Washington, intemperance was rife in
public places.
The two political parties remained silent on the question. Hand in hand
with intemperance went the crime of bribery by money--by proffered
office.
For many years after the war had been almost forgotten, in many of the
legislatures it was impossible to get a bill through unless it had
financial consideration.
The question was asked softly, sometimes very softly, in regard to a
bill: "Is there any money in it?" And the lobbies of the Legislatures
and the National Capitol were crowded with railroad men and
manufacturers and contractors. The iniquity became so great that
sometimes reformers and philanthropists have been laughed out of
Harrisburg, and Albany, and Trenton, and Washington, because they came
empty-handed. "You vote for this bill, and I'll vote for that bill."
"You favour that monopoly of a moneyed institution, and I'll favour the
other monopoly of another institution." And here is a bill that is going
to be very hard to get through the Legislature, and some friends met
together at a midnight banquet, and while intoxicated promised to vote
the same way. Here are $5,000 for prudent distribution in this
direction, and here are $1,000 for prudent distribution in that
direction. Now, we are within four votes of having enough. $5,000 to
that intelligent member from Westchester, and $2,000 to that stupid
member from Ulster, and now we are within two votes of having it. Give
$500 to this member, who will be sick and stay at home, and $300 to this
member, who will go to see his great-aunt languishing in her last
sickness. The day has come for the passing of the bill. The Speaker's
gavel strikes. "Senators, are you ready for the question? All in favour
of voting away these thousands of millions of dollars will say, 'Ay.'"
"Ay! Ay! Ay! Ay!" "The Ays have it." It was a merciful thing that all
this corruption went on under a republican form of government. Any other
style of government would have been consumed by it long ago. There were
enough national swindles enacted in this country after the war--yes,
thirty years afterwards--to swamp three monarchies.
The Democratic party filled its cup of iniquity as it went out of power,
before the war. Then the Republican party came along and it filled its
cup of iniquity a little sooner; and there they lie, the Democratic
party and the Republican party, side by side, great loathsome carcasses
of iniquity, each one worse than the other.
These are reminiscences of more than thirty years ago, and yet it seems
that I have never ceased to fight the same sort of human temptations and
frailties to this very day.