1877-1879
Without boast it may be said that I was among those men who with eager
and persistent vigilance made the heart of Brooklyn feel the Christian
purpose of the pulpit, and the utility of religion in everyday life. The
fifteen years following the dedication of the new Tabernacle in 1872
mark the most active milestone of my career as a preacher.
A minister's recollections are confined to his interpretation of the
life about him; the men he knows, the events he sees, the good and the
bad of his environment and his period become the loose leaves that
litter his study table.
I was in the prime of life, just forty years of age. From my private
note-books and other sources I begin recollections of the most
significant years in Brooklyn, preceding the local elections in 1877.
New York and Brooklyn were playmates then, seeming rivals, but by
predestined fate bound to grow closer together. I said then that we need
not wait for the three bridges which would certainly bind them together.
The ferry-boat then touching either side was only the thump of one great
municipal heart. It was plain to me that this greater Metropolis,
standing at the gate of this continent, would have to decide the moral
and political destinies of the whole country.
Prior to the November Elections in 1877, the only cheering phase of
politics in Brooklyn and New York was that there were no lower political
depths to reach.
There was in New York at that time political infamy greater than the
height of Trinity Church steeple, more stupendous in finance than the
$10,000,000 spent in building their new Court House. It was a fact that
the most notorious gambler in the United States was to get the
nomination for the high office of State Senator. Both Democrats and
Republicans struggled for his election--John Morrisey, hailed as a
reformer! On behalf of all the respectable homes of Brooklyn and New
York I protested against his election. He had been indicted for
burglary, indicted for assault and battery with intent to kill, indicted
eighteen times for maintaining gambling places in different parts of the
country. He almost made gambling respectable. Tweed trafficked in
contracts, Morrisey in the bodies and souls of young men. The District
Attorney of New York advocated him, and prominent Democrats talked
themselves hoarse for him. This nomination was a determined effort of
the slums of New York to get representation in the State Government. It
was argued that he had _reformed_. The police of New York knew better.
In Brooklyn the highest local offices in 1877, those of the Collector,
Police Commissioners, Fire Commission, Treasurer, and the City Works
Commissioners, were under the control of one Patrick Shannon, owner of
two gin mills. Wearing the mask of reformers the most astute and
villainous politicians piloted themselves into power. They were all
elected, and it was necessary. It was necessary that New York should
elect the foremost gambler of the United States for State Senator,
before the people of New York could realise the depths of degradation to
which the politics of that time could sink. If Tweed had stolen only
half as much as he did, investigation and discovery and reform would
have been impossible. The re-election of Morrisey was necessary. He was
elected not by the vote of his old partisans alone, but by Republicans.
Hamilton Fish, General Grant's secretary, voted for him. Peter Cooper,
the friend of education and the founder of a great institute, voted for
him. The brown-stone-fronts voted for him. The Fifth Avenue equipage
voted for him. Murray Hill voted for him. Meanwhile gambling was made
honourable. And so the law-breaker became the law-maker.
Among a large and genteel community in Brooklyn there was a feeling that
they were independent of politics. No one can be so. It was felt in the
home and in the business offices. It was an influence that poisoned all
the foundations of public and private virtue in Brooklyn and New York.
The conditions of municipal immorality and wickedness were the worst at
this time that ever confronted the pulpits of the City of Churches, as
Brooklyn was called.
There was one bright spot in the dark horizon of life around me then,
however, which I greeted with much pleasure and amusement.
In the early part of November, 1877, President Hayes offered to Colonel
Robert Ingersoll the appointment of Minister to Germany. The President
was a Methodist, and perhaps he thought that was a grand solution of
Ingersollism. It was a mirthful event of the hour--the joke of the
administration. Germany was the birthplace of what was then modern
infidelity, Colonel Ingersoll had been filling the land with belated
infidelism.
On the stage of the Academy of Music in Brooklyn he had attacked the
memory of Tom Paine, assaulted the character of Rev. Dr. Prime, one of
my neighbours, the Nestor of religious journalism, and on that same
stage expressed his opinion that God was a great Ghost. This action of
President Hayes kept me smiling for a week--I appreciated the joke among
others.
During this month the American Stage suffered the loss of three
celebrities: Edwin Adams, George L. Fox, and E.L. Davenport. While the
Theatre never interested me, and I never entered one, I cannot criticise
the dead. Four years before in the Tabernacle I preached a sermon
against the Theatre. I saw there these men, sitting in pews in front of
me, and that was the only time. They were taking notes of my discourse,
to which they made public replies on the stage of the Chestnut Street
Theatre, Philadelphia, and on other stages at the close of their
performances. Whatever they may have said of me, I stood uncovered in
the presence of the dead, while the curtain of the great future went up
on them. My sympathy was with the destitute households left behind.
Public benefits relieved this. I would to God clergymen were as liberal
to the families of deceased clergymen as play-actors to the families of
dead play-actors. What a toilsome life, the play-actor's! On the 25th of
March, 1833, Edmund Kean, sick and exhausted, trembled on to the English
stage for the last time, when he acted in the character of Othello. The
audience rose and cheered, and the waving of hats and handkerchiefs was
bewildering, and when he came to the expression, "Farewell! Othello's
occupation's gone!" his chin fell on his breast, and he turned to his
son and said: "O God, I am dying! speak to them Charles," and the
audience in sympathy cried, "Take him off! take him off!" and he was
carried away to die. Poor Edmund Kean! When Schiller, the famous
comedian, was tormented with toothache, some one offered to draw the
tooth. "No," said he, "but on the 10th of June, when the house closes,
you may draw the tooth, for then I shall have nothing to eat with it."
The impersonation of character is often the means of destroying health.
Molière, the comedian, acted the sick man until it proved fatal to him.
Madame Clarion accounts for her premature old age by the fact that she
had been obliged so often on the stage to enact the griefs and
distresses of others. Mr. Bond threw so much earnestness into the
tragedy of "Zarah," that he fainted and died. The life of the actor and
actress is wearing and full of privation and annoyance, as is any life
that depends upon the whims of the public for success.
One of the events in Church matters, towards the close of this year, was
a pastoral letter of the Episcopal Bishops against Church fairs. So many
churches were holding fairs then, they were a recognised social
attribute of the Church family. This letter aroused the question as to
whether it was right or wrong to have Church fairs, and the newspapers
became very fretful about it. I defended the Church fairs, because I
felt that if they were conducted on Christian principles they were the
means of an universal sociality and spiritual strength. So far as I had
been acquainted with them, they had made the Church purer, better. Some
fairs may end in a fight; they are badly managed, perhaps. A Church
fair, officered by Christian women, held within Christian hours,
conducted on Christian plans, I approved, the pastoral letter of the
Episcopal Bishops notwithstanding.
Just when we were in the midst of this religious tempest of small
finances, the will of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt came up in the
court for discussion. The whole world was anxious then to know if the
Vanderbilt will could be broken. After battling half a century with
diseases enough to kill ten men, Mr. Vanderbilt died, an octogenarian,
leaving over $100,000,000--$95,000,000 to his eldest son--$5,000,000 to
his wife, and the remainder to his other children and relations, with
here and there a slight recognition of some humane or religious
institution. I said then that the will could not be broken, because
$95,000,000 in this country seemed too mighty for $5,000,000. It was a
strange will, and if Mr. Vanderbilt had been his own executor of it,
without lawyers' interference, I believe it would have been different.
It suggests a comparison with George Peabody, who executed the
distribution of his property without legal talent. Peabody gave $250,000
for a library in his own town in Massachusetts, and in his will left
$10,000 to the Baltimore Institute, $20,000 to the poor of London,
$10,000 to Harvard, $150,000 to Yale, $50,000 to Salem, Massachusetts,
and $3,000,000 to the education of the people of the South in this
country. No wonder he refused a baronetcy which the Queen of England
offered him, he was a king--the king of human benefaction. That
Vanderbilt will was the seven days wonder of its time.
It made way only for the President's message issued the first week in
December, 1877. It was, in fact, Mr. Hayes's repudiation of a dishonest
measure prepared by members of Congress to pay off our national debt in
silver instead of in gold as had been promised.
The newspapers received the President's message with indifferent
opinion. "It is disappointing," said one. "As a piece of composition it
is terse and well written," said another. "The President used a good
many big words to say very little," said another. "President Hayes will
secure a respectful hearing by the ability and character of this
document," said another. "Leaving out his bragging over his policy of
pacification and concerning things he claims to have done, the space
remaining will be very small," said another.
But all who read the message carefully realised that in it the President
promised the people to put an end to the dishonour of thieving politics.
There was something in the air in Washington that seemed to afflict the
men who went there with moral distemper. I was told that Coates Ames was
almost a Christian in Massachusetts, while in Washington, from his
house, was born that monster--The Credit Mobilier. Congressmen who in
their own homes would insist upon paying their private obligations,
dollar for dollar, forgot this standard of business honour when they
advocated a swindling policy for the Government of the United States. In
its day of trouble the Government was glad to promise gold to the people
who had confidence in them, and just as gladly the Government proposed
to swindle them by a silver falsehood in 1877. But the Nation was just
recovering from a four years' drunk; Mr. Hayes undertook to steady us,
during the aftereffects of our war-spree. Why should we neglect to pay
in full the price of our four years' unrighteousness? As a nation we
had so often been relieved from financial depression up to that time,
but, we were just entering a period of unlicensed ethics, not merely in
public life, but in all our private standards of morality.
It seems to me, as I recall the character of Brooklyn life at this time,
there never was a period in its history when it was so intolerably
wicked. And yet, we had 276 churches. One night about Christmas time, in
1877, Brooklyn Heights was startled by a pistol shot that set everyone
in New York and Brooklyn to moralising. It was the Johnson tragedy. A
young husband shot his young wife, with intent to kill. She was
seriously wounded. He went to prison. There was a child, and for the
sake of that child, who is now probably grown up, I will not relate the
details. In all my experience of life I have heard many stories of
domestic failure, but there are always two sides. Those who moralised
about it said, "That's what comes of marrying too young!" Others,
moralising too, said, "That's what comes of not controlling one's
temper." Who does control his temper, always?
To my mind the chief lesson was in the fact that the young men of
Brooklyn had taken too much of a notion to carry firearms. There was a
puppyism sprang up in Brooklyn that felt they couldn't live unless they
were armed. Young boys went about their daily occupations armed to the
teeth, as if Fulton Street were an ambush for Indians. I mention this,
because it was a singular phase of the social restlessness and tremor of
the times.
In commercial evolution there was the same indistinctness of standards.
The case of Dr. Lambert--the Life Insurance fraud--had no sooner been
disposed of, and Lambert sent to Sing-Sing, than the sudden failure of
Bonner & Co., brokers in Wall Street, presented us with the problem of
business "rehypothecation."
In my opinion a man has as much right to fail in business as he has to
get sick and die. In most cases it is more honourable to fail than to go
on. Every insolvent is not necessarily a scoundrel. The greatest crime
is to fail rich. John Bonner & Co., as brokers, had loaned money on
deposited collaterals, and then borrowed still larger sums on the same
collaterals. Their creditors were duped to the extent of from one to
three millions of dollars. It was the first crime of "rehypothecation."
It was not a Wall Street theft; it was a new use for an almost unknown
word in Noah Webster's dictionary. It was a new word in the rogue's
vocabulary. It was one of the first attempts made, in my knowledge, to
soften the aspect of crime by baptising it in that way. Crime in this
country will always be excused in proportion to how great it is. But
even in the face of Wall Street tricksters there were signs that the
days were gone when the Jay Goulds and the Jim Fisks could hold the
nation at their mercy.
The comedy of life is sometimes quite as instructive as a tragedy. There
was a flagrant disposition in America, in the late 'seventies, to
display family affairs in the newspapers. It became an epidemic of
notoriety. What a delicious literature it was! The private affairs of
the household printed by the million copies. Chief among these
novelettes of family life was the Hicks-Lord case. The world was
informed one morning in February, 1878, that a Mr. Lord, a millionaire,
had united his fortune with a Mrs. Hicks. The children of the former
were offended at the second marriage of the latter, more especially so
as the new reunion might change the direction of the property. The
father was accused of being insane by his children, and incapable of
managing his own affairs. The Courts were invoked. One thing was made
plain to all the world, though, that Mr. Lord at eighty knew more than
his children did at thirty or forty. The happy pair were compelled to
remain in long seclusion because of murderous threats against them, the
children having proposed a corpse instead of a bride. The absorbing
question of weeks, "Where is Mr. Lord?" was answered. He was in the
newspapers--and the children? they were across the old man's knee, where
they belonged. Mr. Lord was right. Mrs. Hicks was right. It was nobody's
business but their own. Brooklyn and New York were exceeding busy-bodies
in the late 'seventies. It was a relief to turn one's back upon them
occasionally, in the pulpit, and search the furthest horizon of Europe.
Scarcely had Victor Emmanuel been entombed when on Feb. 7th a tired old
man, eighty-four years of age, died in the Vatican, Pius IX., a kind and
forgiving man. His trust was not wholly in the crucifix, but something
beyond the crucifix; and yet, how small a man is when measured by the
length of his coffin! Events in Europe marshalled themselves into a
formula of new problems at the beginning of 1878. The complete defeat of
Turkey by the Russians left England and the United States--allies in the
great causes of civilisation and Christianity--aghast. It was the most
intense political movement in Europe of my lifetime. I was glad the
Turkish Empire had perished, but I had no admiration then for Russia,
once one of the world's greatest oppressors.
My deepest sympathies at that time were with England. When England is
humiliated the Christian standards of the world are humiliated. Her
throne during Queen Victoria's reign was the purest throne in all the
world. Remember the girl Victoria, kneeling with her ecclesiastical
adviser in prayer the night before her coronation, making religious
vows, not one of which were broken. I urged then that all our American
churches throughout the land unite with the cathedrals and churches in
England in shouting "God Save the Queen." England held the balance of
the world's power for Christianity in this crisis abroad.
About this time, in February, 1878, Senator Pierce presented a Bill
before the Legislature in Albany for a new city charter for Brooklyn. In
its reform movement it meant that in three years at the most Brooklyn
and New York would be legally married. Instead of Brooklyn being
depressed by New York, New York was to be elevated by Brooklyn. Already
we felt at that time, in the light of Senator Pierce's efforts, that
Brooklyn would become a reformed New York; it would be--New York with
its cares set aside, New York with its arms folded at rest, New York
playing with the children, New York at the tea table, New York gone to
prayer-meeting. Nine-tenths of the Brooklynites then were spending their
days in New York, and their nights in Brooklyn. In the year 1877,
80,000,000 of people crossed the Brooklyn ferries. Paris is France,
London is England, why not New York the United States?
The new charter recommended by Senator Pierce urged other reforms in a
local government that was too costly by far. Under right administration
who could tell what our beloved city is to be? Prospect Park, the
geographical centre, a beautiful picture set in a great frame of
architectural affluence. The boulevards reaching to the sea, their
sides lined the whole distance with luxurious homes and academies of
art. Our united city a hundred Brightons in one, and the inland
populations coming down here to summer and battle in the surf. The great
American London built by a continent on which all the people are free;
her vast populations redeemed; her churches thronged with worshipful
auditories! Before that time we may have fallen asleep amid the long
grass of the valleys, but our children will enjoy the brightness and the
honour of residence in the great Christian city of the continent and of
the world.
It was this era of optimism in the civic life of Brooklyn that helped to
defeat the Lafayette Avenue railroad.
It was a scheme of New York speculators to deface one of the finest
avenues in Brooklyn. The most profitable business activity in this
country is to invest other people's money. It seemed to me that the
Lafayette railroad deal was only a sort of blackmailing institution to
compel the property holders to pay for the discontinuance of the
enterprise, or the company would sell out to some other company; and as
the original company paid nothing all they get is clear gain; and
whether the railroad is built or not, the people for years, all along
the beautiful route, would be kept in suspense. There was no more need
of a car track along Lafayette avenue than there was need of one from
the top of Trinity Church steeple to the moon! The greater facility of
travel, the greater prosperity! But I am opposed to all railroads, the
depot for which is an unprincipled speculator's pocket.
It was only a few weeks later that I had to condemn a much greater
matter, a national event.
On March 1, 1878, the Silver Bill was passed in Washington,
notwithstanding the President's veto. The House passed it by a vote of
196 against 73, and the Senate agreed with a vote of 46 against 10. It
would be asking too much to expect anyone to believe that the 196 men in
Congress were bought up. So far as I knew the men, they were as honest
on one side of the vote as on the other. Senator Conkling, that giant of
integrity, opposed it. Alexander H. Stephens voted for it. I talked with
Mr. Stephens about it, and he said to me at the time, "Unless the Silver
Bill pass, in the next six months there will not be two hundred business
houses in New York able to stand." Still, the Silver Bill seemed like
the first step towards repudiation of our national obligation, but I
believe that at least 190 out of those 196 men who voted for it would
have sacrificed their lives rather than repudiate our national debt.
I had an opportunity to comprehend the political explosion of the
passage of this Bill all over the country, for it so happened I made a
lecturing trip through the South and South-west during the month of
March, 1878.
There is one word that described the whole feeling in the South at this
time, and that was "hope." The most cheerful city, I found, was New
Orleans. She was rejoicing in the release from years of unrighteous
government. Just how the State of Louisiana had been badgered, and her
every idea of self-government insulted, can be appreciated only by those
who come face to face with the facts. While some of the best patriots of
the North went down with the right motives to mingle in the
reconstruction of the State governments of the South, many of these
pilgrimists were the cast-off and thieving politicians of the North,
who, after being stoned out of Northern waters, crawled up on the beach
at the South to sun themselves. The Southern States had enough dishonest
men of their own without any importation. The day of trouble passed.
Louisiana and South Carolina for the most part are free. Governor
Nichols of the one, and Governor Wade Hampton of the other, had the
confidence of the great masses of the people.
It was my opinion then that the largest fortunes were yet to be made in
the South, because there was more room to make them there. During my two
weeks in the South, at that time, mingling with all classes of people, I
never heard an unkind word against the North, and that only a little
over ten years since the close of the war. Congressional politicians
were still enlarging upon the belligerency of the South, but they had
personal designs at President making. There was no more use for Federal
military in New Orleans than there was need of them in Brooklyn. I was
the guest in New Orleans of the Hon. E.J. Ellis, many years in Congress,
and I had a taste of real Southern hospitality. It was everywhere. The
spirit of fraternity was in the South long before it reached the North.
Up to this time I had echoed Horace Greeley's advice, "Go West." For
years afterwards I changed it. In my advice to young men I said to all,
"Go South."
In the spring of 1878, however, things in Brooklyn began to look more
promising for young men and young women. I remember after closely
examining Mayor Howell's report and the Police Commissioner's report I
was much pleased. Mayor Howell was one of the most courteous and genial
men I ever knew, and Superintendent Campbell was a good police officer.
These two men, by their individual interest in Brooklyn reforms, had
gained the confidence of our tax-payers and our philanthropists. The
police force was too small for a city of 5,000,000 people. The taxes
were not big enough to afford an adequate equipment. There was a
constant depreciation of our police and excise officials in the
churches. City officials should not be caricatured--they should be
respected, or dismissed. It was about this time a mounted police
department was started in Brooklyn, and though small it was needed. What
the miscreant community of Brooklyn most needed at this time was not
sermons or lessons in the common schools, but a police club--and they
got it.
There was a political avarice in Brooklyn in the management of our
public taxes which handicapped the local government. For a long while I
had been thinking about some way of presenting this sin to my people,
when one day a woman, Barbara Allen by name, dropping in fatal illness,
was picked up at the Fulton Ferry House, and died in the ambulance. On
her arm was a basket of cold victuals she had lugged from house to
house. In the rags of her clothing were found deposit slips in the
savings banks of Brooklyn--for $20,000. The case was unique at that
time, because in those days great wealth was unknown, even in New York,
and the houses in Brooklyn were homes--not museums. Twenty thousand
dollars was a fortune. It was a precedent that established miserliness
as an actual sin, a dissipation just as deadly as that of the
spendthrift. It was a tragic scene from the drama of life, and its
surprise was avarice. The whole country read about Barbara Allen, and
wondered what new strange disease this was that could scourge a human
soul with a madness for accumulating money without spending it. The
people of the United States suffered from quite a different idea of
money. They were just beginning to feel the great American fever for
spending more of it than they could get. This was a serious phase of
social conditions then, and I remember how keenly I felt the menace of
it at the time. Those who couldn't get enough to spend became envious,
jealous, hateful of those who could and these envious ones were the
American masses.
In the spring of 1878, in May, there was a tiger sprang out of this
jungle of discontent, and, crouching, threatened to spring upon American
Society.
It was--Communism. Its theory was that what could not be obtained
lawfully, under the pressure of circumstances, you could take anyhow.
Communism meant no individual rights in property. If wages were not
adequate to the luxurious appetite, then the wage-earner claimed the
right to knock his employer down and take what he wanted. "Bread or
blood" was the motto. It all came from across the Atlantic, and it
spread rapidly. In Brooklyn, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, it was
evident that Communism was organising, that its executive desperadoes
met in rooms, formed lodges, invented grips and pass-words.
In the eighth ward of New York an organisation was unearthed at this
time, consisting of 800 men, all armed with muskets and revolvers. These
organisations described themselves as working-men's parties, and so
tried to ally themselves with the interests of trade unions.
Twenty American newspapers advocated this shocking creed. Tens of
thousands adopted this theory. I said then, in response to the opinion
that Communism was impossible in this country, that there were just as
many cut-throats along the East River and the Hudson as there were
along the Seine or the Thames. There was only one thing that prevented
revolution in our cities in this memorable spring of 1878, and that was
the police and the military guard.
Through dissatisfaction about wages, or from any cause, men have a right
to stop work, and to stop in bands and bodies until their labour shall
be appreciated; but when by violence, as in the summer of 1877, they
compel others to stop, or hinder substitutes from taking the places,
then the act is Communistic, and ought to be riven of the lightnings of
public condemnation. What was the matter in Pittsburg that summer? What
fired the long line of cars that made night hideous? What lifted the
wild howl in Chicago? Why, coming toward that city, were we obliged to
dismount from the cars and take carriages through the back streets? Why,
when one night the Michigan Central train left Chicago, were there but
three passengers on board a train of eight cars? What forced three rail
trains from the tracks and shot down engineers with their hands on the
valves? Communism. For hundreds of miles along the track leading from
the great West I saw stretched out and coiled up the great reptile
which, after crushing the free locomotive of passengers and trade, would
have twisted itself around our republican institutions, and left them in
strangulation and blood along the pathway of nations. The governors of
States and the President of the United States did well in planting the
loaded cannon at the head of streets blocked up by desperadoes. I felt
the inspiration of giving warning, and I did.
But the summer came, August came, and after a lecture tour through the
far West I was amazed and delighted to find there a tremendous harvest
in the grain fields. I had seen immense crops there about to start on
their way to the Eastern sea-boundary of our continent. I saw then that
our prosperity as a nation would depend upon our agriculture. It didn't
make any difference what the Greenback party, or the Republican and
Democratic parties, or the Communists were croaking about; the immense
harvests of the West indicated that nothing was the matter. What we
needed in the fall of 1878 was some cheerful talk.
During this summer two of the world's celebrities died: Charles Mathews,
the famous comedian, and the great American poet, William Cullen Bryant.
Charles Mathews was an illustrious actor. He was born to make the world
laugh, but he had a sad life of struggle.
While Charles Mathews was performing in London before immense audiences,
one day a worn-out and gloomy man came into a doctor's shop, saying,
"Doctor, what can you do for me?" The doctor examined his case and said,
"My advice is that you go and see Charles Mathews." "Alas! Alas!" said
the man, "I myself am Charles Mathews."
In the loss of William Cullen Bryant I felt it as a personal bereavement
of a close friend. Nowhere have I seen the following incident of his
life recorded, an incident which I still remember as one of the great
events in my life.
In the days of my boyhood I attended a meeting at Tripler Hall, held as
a memorial of Fenimore Cooper, who at that time had just died.
Washington Irving stepped out on the speaker's platform first,
trembling, and in evident misery. After stammering and blushing and
bowing, he completely broke down in his effort to make a speech, and
briefly introduced the presiding officer of the meeting, Daniel
Webster. Rising like a huge mountain from a plain this great orator
introduced another orator--the orator of the day--William Cullen Bryant.
In that memorable oration, lasting an hour and a half, the speaker told
lovingly the story of the life and death of the author of "Leather
Stocking" and "The Last of the Mohicans."
George W. Bethune followed him, thundering out in that marvellous flow
of ideas, with an eloquence that made him the pulpit orator of his
generation in the South. Bryant's hair was then just touched with grey.
The last time I saw him was in my house on Oxford Street, two years ago,
in a company of literary people. I said: "Mr. Bryant, will you read for
us 'Thanatopsis'?" He blushed like a girl, and put his hands over his
face and said: "I would rather read anything than my own production; but
if it will give you pleasure I will do anything you say." Then at 82
years of age, and without spectacles, he stood up and with most pathetic
tenderness read the famous poem of his boyhood days, and from a score of
lips burst forth the exclamation, "What a wonderful old man!" What made
all the land and all the world feel so badly when William Cullen Bryant
was laid down at Roslyn? Because he was a great poet who had died? No;
there have been greater poets. Because he was so able an editor? No;
there have been abler editors. Because he was so very old? No; some have
attained more years. It was because a spotless and noble character
irradiated all he wrote and said and did.
These great men of America, how much they were to me, in their example
of doing and living!
Probably there are many still living who remember what a disorderly
place Brooklyn once was. Gangs of loafers hung around our street
corners, insulting and threatening men and women. Carriages were held up
in the streets, the occupants robbed, and the vehicles stolen.
Kidnapping was known. Behind all this outrage of civil rights was
political outrage. The politicians were afraid to offend the criminals,
because they might need their votes in future elections. They were
immune, because they were useful material in case of a new governor or
President. It was a reign of terror that spread also in other large
cities. The farmers of Ohio and Pennsylvania were threatened if they did
not stop buying labour-saving machinery. They were not the threats of
the working-man, but of the lazy, criminal loafers of the country. It is
worth mentioning, because it was a convulsion of an American period, a
national growing pain, which I then saw and talked about. The nation was
under the cloud of political ambition and office-seeking that unsettled
business conditions. Every one was occupied in President-making,
although we were two years from the Presidential election. There was
plenty of money, but people held on to it.
The yellow fever scourge came down upon the South during the late summer
of 1878, and softened the hearts of some. There was some money
contributed from the North, but not as much as there ought to have been.
In the Brooklyn Tabernacle we did the best we could; New York city had
been ravaged by yellow fever in 1832, the year I was born, but the
memory of that horror was not keen enough to influence the collection
plate. What with this suffering of our neighbours in the South, and the
troubles of political jealousies local and national, there were cares
enough for our church to consider. Still, the summer of 1878 was almost
through, and many predictions of disaster had failed. We had been
threatened with general riots. It was predicted that on June 27 all the
cars and railroad stations would be burned, because of a general strike
order. We were threatened with a fruit famine. It was said that the
Maryland and New Jersey peach crop was a failure. I never saw or ate so
many peaches any summer before.
Then there was the Patten investigation committee, determined to send
Mr. Tilden down to Washington to drive the President out of the White
House. None of these things happened, yet it is interesting to recall
this phase of American nerves in 1878.
There was one event that aroused my disgust, however, much more than the
croakers had done--Ben Butler was nominated for Governor of
Massachusetts. That was when politics touched bottom. There was no lower
depths of infamy for them to reach. Ben Butler was the chief demagogue
of the land. The Republican party was to be congratulated that it got
rid of him. His election was a cross put upon the State of Massachusetts
for something it had done we knew not of. Fortunately there were men
like Roscoe Conkling in politics to counterbalance other kinds.
Backed up by unscrupulous politicians, the equally irresponsible
railroad promoter began his invasion of city streets with his noisy
scheme. I opposed him, but the problem of transportation then was not as
it is now. Just as the year 1879 had begun, a gigantic political
promoting scheme for an elevated railroad in Brooklyn was attempted.
From Boston came the promoters with a proposition to build the road,
without paying a cent of indemnity to property holders. I suggested
that an appeal be made to Brooklynites to subscribe to a company for the
agricultural improvements of Boston Common. It was a parallel absurdity.
Mayor Howell, of Brooklyn, courageously opposed an elevated road
franchise, unless property holders were paid according to the damage to
the property. This was one of many inspired grafts of political
Brooklyn, years ago.
A great event in the world was the announcement in November, 1878, that
Professor Thomas Edison had applied for a patent for the discovery of
the incandescent electric light. He harnessed the flame of a thunderbolt
to fit in a candlestick. I hope he made millions of dollars out of it.
In direct contradiction to this progress in daily life there came, at
the same time, from the Philadelphia clergy a protest against printing
their sermons in the secular press. It was an injustice to them, they
declared, because the sermons were not always fully reported. I did not
share these opinions. If a minister's gospel is not fit for fifty
thousand people, then it is not fit for the few hundred members of his
congregation. My own sermons were being published in the secular press
then, as they had been when I was in Philadelphia.
Almost at the close of the year 1878 the loss of the S.S. "Pomerania,"
in collision in the English Channel, was a disaster of the sea that I
denounced as nothing short of murder. It was shown at the trial that
there was no fog at the time, that the two vessels saw each other for
ten minutes before the collision. If such gross negligence as this was
possible, I advised those people who bought a ticket for Europe on the
White Star, the Cunard, the Hamburg, or other steamship lines, to secure
at the same time a ticket for Heaven. What a difference in the ocean
ferry-boat of to-day!
Scarcely had the submarine telegraph closed this chapter of sea horror
than it clicked the information that the beautiful Princess Alice had
died in Germany. Only a few days later, in America, we were in mood of
mourning for Bayard Taylor, our Minister Plenipotentiary to Germany. In
the death of Princess Alice we felt chiefly a sympathy for Queen
Victoria, who had not then, and never did, overcome her grief at the
loss of Prince Albert. In the decease of Bayard Taylor we remembered
with pride that he was a self-made gentleman of a school for which there
is no known system of education. Regarded as a dreamy, unpractical boy,
nothing much was ever expected of him. When he was seventeen he set type
in a printing office in Westchester. It was Bayard Taylor who exploded
the idea that only the rich could afford to go to Europe, when on less
than a thousand dollars he spent two years amid the palaces and temples,
telling of his adventures in a way that contributed classic literature
to our book-shelves. He worked hard--wrote thirty-five books. There is
genius in hard work alone. I have often thought that women pursue more
of it than men. They work night and day, year in and year out, from
kitchen to parlour, from parlour to kitchen.
There was some strong legislative effort made in our country about this
time to exclude the Chinese. I opposed this legislation with all the
voice and ability I had, because I felt not merely the injustice of such
contradiction of all our national institutions, but I saw its political
folly. I saw that the nation that would be the most friendly to China,
and could get on the inside track of her commerce, would be the first
nation of the world. The legislature seemed particularly angry with the
Chinese immigrants in this country because they would not allow
themselves to be buried here. They were angry with the Chinese then
because they would not intermarry. They were angry with the Chinese
because they invested their money in China. They did not think they were
handsome enough for this country. We even wanted a monopoly of good
looks in those days.
I was particularly friendly to the Chinese. My brother, John Van Nest
Talmage, devoted his life to them. I believed, as my brother did, that
they were a great nation.
When he went, my last brother went. Stunned was I until I staggered
through the corridors of the hotel in London, England, when the news
came that John was dead. If I should say all that I felt I would declare
that since Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles a more faithful or
consecrated man has not lifted his voice in the dark places of
heathenism. I said it while he was alive, and might as well say it now
that he is dead. He was the hero of our family. He did not go to China
to spend his days because no one in America wanted to hear him preach.
At the time of his first going to China he had a call to succeed in
Brooklyn, N.Y., the Rev. Dr. Broadhead, the Chrysostom of the American
pulpit, a call at a large salary; and there would have been nothing
impossible to my brother in the way of religious work or Christian
achievement had he tarried in his native land. But nothing could detain
him from the work to which God called him long before he became a
Christian.
My reason for writing that anomalous statement is that, when a small boy
in Sabbath-school, he read a library book, "The Life of Henry Martin."
He said to my mother, "I am going to be a missionary." The remark at the
time made no special impression. Years after that passed on before his
conversion; but when the grace of God appeared to him, and he had
entered his studies for the Gospel ministry, he said one day, "Mother,
do you remember that years ago I said, 'I am going to be a missionary'?"
She replied, "Yes, I remember it." "Well," said he, "I am going to keep
my promise." How well he kept it millions of souls on earth and in
Heaven have long since heard. When the roll of martyrs is called before
the throne, the name of John Van Nest Talmage will be called. He worked
himself to death in the cause of the world's evangelisation. His heart,
his brain, his hand, his voice, his muscles, his nerves could do no
more. He sleeps in the cemetery of Somerville, N.J., so near his father
and mother that he will face them when he arises in the resurrection of
the just, and, amid a crowd of his kindred now sleeping on the right of
them and on the left of them, will feel the thrill of the trumpet that
wakes the dead.
You could get nothing from my brother at all. Ask him a question to
evoke what he had done for God and the Church, and his lips were as
tightly shut as though they had never been opened. Indeed, his reticence
was at times something remarkable. I took him to see President Grant at
Long Branch, and though they had both been great warriors, the one
fighting the battles of the Lord and the other the battles of his
country, they had little to say, and there was, I thought, at the time,
more silence crowded together than I ever noticed in the same amount of
space before.
But the story of my brother's work has already been told in the Heavens
by those who, through his instrumentality, have already reached the City
of Raptures. However, his chief work is yet to come. We get our
chronology so twisted that we come to believe that the white marble of
the tomb is the milestone at which the good man stops, when it is only a
milestone on a journey, the most of the miles of which are yet to be
travelled. The Chinese Dictionary which my brother prepared during more
than two decades of study; the religious literature he transferred from
English into Chinese; the hymns he wrote for others to sing, although he
himself could not sing at all (he and I monopolising the musical
incapacity of a family in which all the rest could sing well); the
missionary stations he planted; the life he lived, will widen out and
deepen and intensify through all time and all eternity.
Never in the character of a Chinaman was there the trait of commercial
fraud that assailed our American cities in 1879. It got into our food
finally--the very bread we ate was proven to be an adulteration of
impure stuff. What an extravagance of imagination had crept into our
daily life! We pretended even to eat what we knew we were not eating.
Except for the reminder which old books written in byegone simpler days
gave us, we should have insisted that the world should believe us if we
said black was white. Still, among us there were some who were genuine,
but they seemed to be passing away. It was in this year that the oldest
author in America died, Richard Henry Dana. He was born in 1788, when
literature in this country was just beginning. His death stirred the
tenderest emotions. Authorship was a new thing in America when Mr. Dana
began to write, and it required endurance and persistence. The
atmosphere was chilling to literature then, there was little applause
for poetic or literary skill. There were no encouragements when
Washington Irving wrote as "Knickerbocker," when Richard Henry Dana
wrote "The Buccaneer," "The Idle Man," and "The Dying Raven." There was
something cracking in his wit, exalted in his culture. He was so gentle
in his conversation, so pure in his life, it was hard to spare him. He
seemed like a man who had never been forced into the battle of the
world, he was so unscarred and hallowed.
It was just about this time that our Tabernacle in Brooklyn became the
storm centre of a law-suit which threatened to undermine us. It was
based upon a theory, a technicality of law, which declared that the
subscriptions of married women were not legal subscriptions. Our
attorneys were Mr. Freeman and Judge Tenney. Theirs was a battle for God
and the Church. There were only two sides to the case. Those against the
Church and those with the Church. In the preceding eight years, whether
against fire or against foe, the Tabernacle had risen to a higher plane
of useful Christian work. I was not alarmed. During the two weeks of
persecution, the days were to me days of the most complete peace I had
felt since I entered the Christian life. Again and again I remember
remarking in my home, to my family, what a supernatural peace was upon
me. My faith was in God, who managed my life and the affairs of the
Church. My work was still before me, there was too much to be done in
the Tabernacle yet. The disapproval of our methods before the Brooklyn
Presbytery was formulated in a series of charges against the pastor. I
was told my enthusiasm was sinful, that it was unorthodox for me to be
so. My utterances were described as inaccurate. My editorial work was
offensively criticised. The Presbytery listened patiently, and after a
careful consideration dismissed the charges. Once more the unjust
oppression of enemies had seemed to extend the strength and scope of the
Gospel. A few days later my congregation presented me with a token of
confidence in their pastor. I was so happy at the time that I was ready
to shake hands even with the reporters who had abused me. How kind they
were, how well they understood me, how magnificently they took care of
me, my people of the Brooklyn Tabernacle!