1885-1886
As time kept whispering its hastening call into my ear I grew more and
more vigorous in my outlook. I was given strength to hurry faster
myself, with a certain energy to climb higher up, where the view was
wider, bigger, clearer. As I moved upward I had but one fear, and that
was of looking backward. A minister, entrusted with the charge of souls,
cannot afford to retrace his steps. He must go on, and up, to the top of
his abilities, of his spiritual purposes.
In the midst of a glorious summer, I refused to see the long shadows of
departing day; in the midst of a snow deep winter, I declined to slip
and slide as I went on. So it happened that a great many gathered about
me in the tabernacle, because they felt that I was passing on, and they
wanted to see how fast I could go. I aimed always for a higher place and
the way to get up to it, and I took them along with me, always a little
further, week by week.
The pessimists came to me and said that the world would soon have a
surplus of educated men, that the colleges were turning out many
nerveless and useless youngsters, that education seemed to be one of the
follies of 1885. The fact was we were getting to be far superior to what
we had been. The speeches at the commencement classes were much better
than those we had made in our boyhood. We had dropped the old harangues
about Greece and Rome. We were talking about the present. The sylphs and
naiads and dryads had already gone out of business. College education
had been revolutionised. Students were not stuffed to the Adam's apple
with Latin and Greek. The graduates were improved in physique. A great
advance was reached when male and female students were placed in the
same institutions, side by side. God put the two sexes together in Eden,
He put them beside each other in the family. Why not in the college?
There were those who seemed to regard woman as a Divine afterthought.
Judging by the fashion plates of olden times, in other centuries, the
grand-daughters were far superior to the grand-mothers, and the fuss
they used to make a hundred years ago over a very good woman showed me
that the feminine excellence, so rare then, was more common than it used
to be. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a woman was considered
well educated if she could do a sum in rule of three. Look at the books
in all departments that are under the arms of the school miss now. I
believe in equal education for men and women to fulfil the destiny of
this land.
For all women who were then entering the battle of life, I saw that the
time was coming when they would not only get as much salary as men, but
for certain employments they would receive higher wages. It would not
come to them through a spirit of gallantry, but through the woman's
finer natural taste, greater grace of manner, and keener perceptions.
For these virtues she would be worth ten per cent. more to her employer
than a man. But she would get it by earning it, not by asking for it.
In the summer of 1885 I made another trip to Europe. The day I reached
Charing Cross station in London the exposures of vice in the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ were just issued. The paper had not been out half an hour. Mr.
Stead, the editor, was later put on trial for startling Europe and
America in his crusade against crime. There were the same conditions in
America, in Upper Broadway, and other big thoroughfares in New York, by
night, as there were in London. I believe the greatest safety against
vice is newspaper chastisement of dishonour and crime. I urged that some
paper in America should attack the social evil, as the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ had done. A hundred thousand people, with banners and music,
gathered in Hyde Park in London, to express their approval of the
reformation started by Mr. Stead, and there were a million people in
America who would have backed up the same moral heroism. If my voice
were loud enough to be heard from Penobscot to the Rio Grande, I would
cry out "Flirtation is damnation." The vast majority of those who make
everlasting shipwreck carry that kind of sail. The pirates of death
attack that kind of craft.
My mail bag was a mirror that reflected all sides of the world, and much
that it showed me was pitifully sordid and reckless. Most of the letters
I answered, others I destroyed.
The following one I saved, for obvious reasons. It was signed, "One of
the Congregation":
"Dear Sir,--I do not believe much that you preach, but I am certain that
you believe it all. To be a Christian I must believe the Bible. To be
truthful, I do not believe it. I go to hear you preach because you
preach the Bible as I was taught it in my youth, by a father, who, like
yourself, believed what in the capacity of a preacher he proclaimed. For
thirty-five years I have been anxious to walk in the path my mother is
treading--a simple faith. I have lived to see my children's children,
and the distance that lies between me and my real estate in the
graveyard, cannot be very great. At my age, it would be worse than folly
to argue, simply to confound or dispute merely for the love of arguing.
My steps are already tottering, and I am lost in the wilderness. I pray
because I am afraid not to pray. What can I do that I have not done, so
that I can see clearly?"
All my sympathies were excited by this letter, because I had been in
that quagmire myself. A student of Doctor Witherspoon once came to him
and said, "I believe everything is imaginary! I myself am only an
imaginary being." The Doctor said to him, "Go down and hit your head
against the college door, and if you are imaginary and the door
imaginary, it won't hurt you."
A celebrated theological professor at Princeton was asked this, by a
sceptic:--
"You say, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old
he will not depart from it. How do you account for the fact that your
son is such a dissipated fellow?"
The doctor replied, "The promise is, that when he is old, he will not
depart from it. My son is not old enough yet." He grew old, and his
faith returned. The Rev. Doctor Hall made the statement that he
discovered in the biographies of one hundred clergymen that they all had
sons who were clergymen, all piously inclined. There is no safe way to
discuss religion, save from the heart; it evaporates when you dare to
analyse its sacred element.
I received multitudes of letters written by anxious parents about sons
who had just come to the city--letters without end, asking aid for
worthy individuals and institutions, which I could not meet even if I
had an income of $500,000 per annum--letters from men who told me that
unless I sent them $25 by return mail they would jump into the East
River--letters from people a thousand miles away, saying if they
couldn't raise $1,500 to pay off a mortgage they would be sold out, and
wouldn't I send it to them--letters of good advice, telling me how to
preach, and the poorer the syntax and the etymology the more insistent
the command. Many encouraging letters were a great help to me. Some
letters of a spiritual beauty and power were magnificent tokens of a
preacher's work. Most of these letters were lacking in one
thing--Christian confidence. And yet, what noble examples there were of
this quality in the world.
What an example was exhibited to all, when, on October 8, 1885, the
organ at Westminster Abbey uttered its deep notes of mourning, at the
funeral of Lord Shaftesbury, in England. It is well to remember such
noblemen as he was. The chair at Exeter Hall, where he so often
presided, should be always associated with him. His last public act, at
84 years of age, was to go forth in great feebleness and make an earnest
protest against the infamies exposed by Mr. Stead in London. In that
dying speech he called upon Parliament to defend the purity of the city.
As far back as 1840, his voice in Parliament rang out against the
oppression of factory workers, and he succeeded in securing better
legislation for them. He worked and contributed for the ragged schools
of England, by which over 200,000 poor children of London were redeemed.
He was President of Bible and Missionary Societies, and was for thirty
years President of the Young Men's Christian Association. I never
forgave Lord Macaulay for saying he hoped that the "praying of Exeter
Hall would soon come to an end." On his 80th birthday, a holiday was
declared in honour of Lord Shaftesbury, and vast multitudes kept it.
From the Lord Mayor himself to the girls of the Water Cress and Flower
Mission, all offered him their congratulations. Alfred Tennyson, the
Poet Laureate, wrote him, "Allow me to assure you in plain prose, how
cordially I join with those who honour the Earl of Shaftesbury as a
friend of the poor." And, how modest was the Earl's reply.
He said: "You have heard that which has been said in my honour. Let me
remark with the deepest sincerity--ascribe it not, I beseech you, to
cant and hypocrisy--that if these statements are partially true, it must
be because power has been given me from above. It was not in me to do
these things."
How constantly through my life have I heard the same testimony of the
power that answers prayer. I believed it, and I said it repeatedly, that
the reason American politics had become the most corrupt element of our
nation was because we had ignored the power of prayer. History
everywhere confesses its force. The Huguenots took possession of the
Carolinas in the name of God. William Penn settled Pennsylvania in the
name of God. The Pilgrim Fathers settled New England in the name of God.
Preceding the first gun of Bunker Hill, at the voice of prayer, all
heads uncovered. In the war of 1812 an officer came to General Andrew
Jackson and said, "There is an unusual noise in the camp; it ought to be
stopped." The General asked what this noise was. He was told it was the
voice of prayer.
"God forbid that prayer and praise should be an unusual noise in the
camp," said General Jackson. "You had better go and join them."
There was prayer at Valley Forge, at Monmouth, at Atlanta, at South
Mountain, at Gettysburg. But the infamy of politics was broad and wide,
and universal. Even the record of Andrew Johnson, our seventeenth
President, was exhumed. He was charged with conspiracy against the
United States Government. Because he came from a border State, where
loyalty was more difficult than in the Northern States, he was accused
of making a nefarious attack against our Government. I did not accept
these charges. They were freighted with political purpose. I said then,
in order to prove General Grant a good man, it was not necessary to try
and prove that Johnson was a bad one. The President from Tennessee left
no sons to vindicate his name. I never saw President Johnson but once,
but I refused to believe these attacks upon him. They were an
unwarranted persecution of the sacred memory of the dead. No man who has
been eminently useful has escaped being eminently cursed.
At our local elections in Brooklyn, in the autumn of 1885, three
candidates for mayor were nominated. They were all exceptionally good
men. Two of them were personal friends of mine, General Catlin and Dr.
Funk. Catlin had twice been brevetted for gallantry in the Civil War,
and Dr. Funk was on the prohibition ticket, because he had represented
prohibition all his life. Mr. Woodward, the third candidate, I did not
know, but he was a strict Methodist, and that was recommendation enough.
But there were pleasanter matters to think about than politics.
In November of this year, there appeared, at the Horticultural Hall in
New York, a wonderful floral stranger from China--the chrysanthemum.
Thousands of people paid to go and see these constellations of beauty.
It was a new plant to us then, and we went mad about it in true American
fashion. To walk among these flowers was like crossing a corner of
heaven. It became a mania of the times, almost like the tulip mania of
Holland in the 17th century. People who had voted that the Chinese must
go, voted that the Chinese chrysanthemum could stay. The rose was
forgotten for the time being, and the violets, and the carnations, and
the lily of the valley. In America we were still the children of the
world, delighted with everything that was new and beautiful.
In Europe, the war dance of nations continued. In the twenty-two years
preceding the year 1820 Christendom had paid ten billions of dollars for
battles. The exorbitant taxes of Great Britain and the United States
were results of war. There was a great wave of Gospel effort in America
to counteract the European war fever. It permeated the legislature in
Albany. One morning some members of the New York legislature inaugurated
a prayer meeting in the room of the Court of Appeals, and that meeting,
which began with six people, at the fifth session overflowed the room.
Think of a Gospel Revival in the Albany Legislature! Yet why not just
such meetings at all State Capitals, in this land of the Pilgrim
Fathers, of the Huguenots, of the Dutch reformers, of the Hungarian
exiles?
Occasionally, we were inspired by the record of honest political
officials. My friend Thomas A. Hendricks died when he was Vice-president
of the United States Government. He was an honest official, and yet he
was charged with being a coward, a hypocrite, a traitor. He was a great
soul. He withstood all the temptations of Washington in which so many
men are lost. I met him first on a lecturing tour in the West. As I
stepped on to the platform, I said, "Where is Governor Hendricks?" With
a warmth and cordiality that came from the character of a man who loved
all things that were true, he stood up, and instead of shaking hands,
put both his arms around my shoulders, saying heartily, "Here I am." I
went on with my lecture with a certain pleasure in the feeling that we
understood each other. Years after, I met him in his rooms in
Washington, at the close of the first session as presiding officer of
the Senate, and I loved him more and more. Many did not realise his
brilliancy, because he had such poise of character, such even methods.
The trouble has been, with so many men of great talent in Washington,
that they stumble in a mire of dissipation. Mr. Hendricks never got
aboard that railroad train so popular with political aspirants. The Dead
River Grand Trunk Railroad is said to have for its stations Tippleton,
Quarrelville, Guzzler's Junction, Debauch Siding, Dismal Swamp, Black
Tunnel, Murderer's Gulch, Hangman's Hollow, and the terminal known as
Perdition.
Mr. Hendricks met one as a man ought always to meet men, without any
airs of superiority, or without any appearance of being bored. A coal
heaver would get from him as polite a bow as a chief justice. He kept
his patience when he was being lied about. Speeches were put in his
mouth which he never made, interviews were written, the language of
which he never used. The newspapers that had lied about him, when he
lived, turned hypocrites, and put their pages in mourning rules when he
died. There were some men appointed to attend his memorial services in
Indianapolis on November 30, 1885, whom I advised to stay away, and to
employ their hours in reviewing those old campaign speeches, in which
they had tried to make a scoundrel out of this man. They were not among
those who could make a dead saint of him. Mr. Hendricks was a Christian,
which made him invulnerable to violent attack. For many years he was a
Presbyterian, afterwards he became associated with the Episcopal Church.
His life began as a farmer's boy at Shelbyville, his hands on the
plough. He was a man who hated show, a man whose counsel in Church
affairs was often sought. Men go through life, usually, with so many
unconsidered ideals in its course, so many big moments in their lives
that the world has never understood.
I remember I was in one of the western cities when the telegram
announcing the death of Cornelius Vanderbilt came, and the appalling
anxiety on all sides, for two days, was something unique in our national
history. It was an event that proved more than anything in my lifetime
the financial convalescence of the nation. When it was found that no
financial crash followed the departure of the wealthiest man in America,
all sensible people agreed that our recuperating prosperity as a nation
was built on a rock. It had been a fictitious state of things before
this. It was an event, which, years before, would have closed one half
of the banks, and suspended hundreds of business firms. The passing of
$200,000,000 from one hand to another, at an earlier period in our
history would have shaken the continent with panic and disaster.
In watching where this $200,000,000 went to, we lost sight of the
million dollars bequeathed by Mr. Vanderbilt to charity. Its destiny is
worth recalling. $100,000 went to the Home and Foreign Missionary
Society; $100,000 to a hospital; $100,000 to the Young Men's Christian
Association; $50,000 to the General Theological Seminary; $50,000 for
Bibles and Prayer-Books; $50,000 to the Home for Incurables; $50,000 to
the missionary societies for seamen; $50,000 to the Home for
Intemperates; $50,000 to the Missionary Society of New York; $50,000 to
the Museum of Art; $50,000 to the Museum of Natural History; and
$100,000 to the Moravian Church. While the world at large was curious
about the money Mr. Vanderbilt did not give to charity, I celebrate his
memory for this one consecrated million.
He was a railroad king, and they were not popular with the masses in
1885-6. And yet, the Grand Central Depot in New York and the Union Depot
in Philadelphia, were the palaces where railroad enterprise admitted the
public to the crowning luxury of the age. Men of ordinary means, of
ordinary ability, could not have achieved these things. And yet it was
necessary to keep armed men in the cemetery to protect Mr. Vanderbilt's
remains. This sort of thing had happened before. Winter quarters were
built near his tomb, for the shelter of a special constabulary. Since
A.T. Stewart's death, there had been no certainty as to where his
remains were. Abraham Lincoln's sepulchre was violated. Only a week
before Mr. Vanderbilt's death, the Phelps family vault at Binghamton,
New York, was broken into. Pinkerton detectives surrounded Mr.
Vanderbilt's body on Staten Island. Wickedness was abroad in all
directions, and there were but fifteen years of the nineteenth century
left in which to redeem the past.
In the summer of 1886, Doctor Pasteur's inoculations against
hydrophobia, and Doctor Ferron's experiments with cholera, following
many years after Doctor Jenner's inoculations against small-pox, were
only segments of the circle which promised an ultimate cure for all the
diseases flesh is heir to. Miracles were amongst us again. I had much
more interest in these medical discoveries than I had in inventions,
locomotive or bellicose. We required no inventions to take us faster
than the limited express trains. We needed no brighter light than
Edison's. A new realm was opening for the doctors. Simultaneously, with
the gleam of hope for a longer life, there appeared in Brooklyn an
impudent demand, made by a combination of men known as the Brewers'
Association. They wanted more room for their beer. The mayor was asked
to appoint a certain excise commissioner who was in favour of more beer
gardens than we already had. They wanted to rule the city from their
beer kegs. In my opinion, a beer garden is worse than a liquor saloon,
because there were thousands of men and women who would enter a beer
garden who would not enter a saloon. The beer gardens merely prepare new
victims for the eventual sacrifice of alcoholism. Brooklyn was in danger
of becoming a city of beer gardens, rather than a city of churches.
On January 24, 1886, the seventeenth year of my pastorate of the
Brooklyn Tabernacle was celebrated. It was an hour for practical proof
to my church that the people of Brooklyn approved of our work. By the
number of pews taken, and by the amount of premiums paid in, I told them
they would decide whether we were to stand still, to go backward, or to
go ahead. We were, at this time, unable to accommodate the audiences
that attended both Sabbath services. The lighting, the warming, the
artistic equipment, all the immense expenses of the church, required a
small fortune to maintain them. We had more friends than the Tabernacle
had ever had before. At no time during my seventeen years' residence in
Brooklyn had there been so much religious prosperity there. The
memberships of all churches were advancing. It was a gratifying year in
the progress of the Gospel in Brooklyn. It had been achieved by constant
fighting, under the spur of sound yet inspired convictions. How close
the events of secular prominence were to the religious spirit, some of
the ministers in Brooklyn had managed to impress upon the people. It was
a course that I pursued almost from my first pastoral call, for I firmly
believed that no event in the world was ever conceived that did not in
some degree symbolise the purpose of human salvation.
When Mr. Parnell returned to England, I expected, from what I had seen
and what I knew of him, that his indomitable force would accomplish a
crisis for the cause of Ireland. My opinion always was that England and
Ireland would each be better without the other. Mr. Parnell's triumph on
his return in January, 1886, seemed complete. He discharged the Cabinet
in England, as he had discharged a previous Cabinet, and he had much to
do with the appointment of their successors. I did not expect that he
would hold the sceptre, but it was clear that he was holding it then
like a true king of Ireland.
There was a storm came upon the giant cedars of American life about this
time, which spread disaster upon our national strength. It was a storm
that prostrated the Cedars of Lebanon.
Secretary Frelinghuysen, Vice-president Hendricks, ex-Governor Seymour,
General Hancock, and John B. Gough were the victims. It was a cataclysm
of fatality that impressed its sadness on the nation. The three
mightiest agencies for public benefit are the printing press, the
pulpit, and the platform. The decease of John B. Gough left the
platforms of America without any orator as great as he had been. For
thirty-five years his theme was temperance, and he died when the fight
against liquor was hottest. He had a rare gift as a speaker. His
influence with an audience was unlike that of any other of his
contemporaries. He shortened the distance between a smile and a tear in
oratory. He was one of the first, if not the first, American speaker who
introduced dramatic skill in his speeches. He ransacked and taxed all
the realm of wit and drama for his work. His was a magic from the heart.
Dramatic power had so often been used for the degradation of society
that speakers heretofore had assumed a strict reserve toward it. The
theatre had claimed the drama, and the platform had ignored it. But Mr.
Gough, in his great work of reform and relief, encouraged the
disheartened, lifted the fallen, adopting the elements of drama in his
appeals. He called for laughter from an audience, and it came; or, if he
called for tears, they came as gently as the dew upon a meadow's grass
at dawn. Mr. Gough was the pioneer in platform effectiveness, the first
orator to study the alchemy of human emotions, that he might stir them
first, and mix them as he judged wisely. So many people spoke of the
drama as though it was something built up outside of ourselves, as if it
were necessary for us to attune our hearts to correspond with the human
inventions of the dramatists. The drama, if it be true drama, is an echo
from something divinely implanted. While some conscienceless people
take this dramatic element and prostitute it in low play-houses, John B.
Gough raised it to the glorious uses of setting forth the hideousness of
vice and the splendour of virtue in the salvation of multitudes of
inebriates. The dramatic poets of Europe have merely dramatised what was
in the world's heart; Mr. Gough interpreted the more sacred dramatic
elements of the human heart. He abolished the old way of doing things on
the platform, the didactic and the humdrum. He harnessed the dramatic
element to religion. He lighted new fires of divine passion in our
pulpits.
The new confidence that this wonderful Cedar of Lebanon put into the
work of contemporary Christian labourers in the vineyard of sacred
meaning is our eternal inheritance of his spirit. He left us his
confidence.
When you destroy the confidence of man in man, you destroy society. The
prevailing idea in American life was of a different character. National
and civic affairs were full of plans to pull down, to make room for new
builders. That was the trouble. There were more builders than there was
space or need to build. A little repairing of old standards would have
been better than tearing those we still remembered to pieces, merely to
give others something to do.
All this led to the betrayal of man by man--to bribery. It was not of
much use for the pulpit to point it out. Men adopted bribery as a means
to business activity. It was of no use to recall the brilliant moments
of character in history, men would not read them. Their ancestry was a
back number, the deeds of their ancestors mere old-fashioned narrowness
of business. What if a member of the American Congress, Joseph Reed,
during the American Revolution did refuse the 10,000 guineas offered by
the foreign commissioners to betray the colonies? What if he did say
"Gentlemen, I am a very poor man, but tell your King he is not rich
enough to buy me"? The more fool he, not to appreciate his
opportunities, not to take advantage of the momentary enterprise of his
betters! A bribe offered became a compliment, and a bribe negotiated was
a good day's work. I had not much faith in the people who went about
bragging how much they could get if they sold out. I refused to believe
the sentiment of men who declared that every man had his price.
Old-fashioned honesty was not the cure either, because old-fashioned
honesty, according to history, was not wholly disinterested. There never
was a monopoly of righteousness in the world, though there was a coin of
fair exchange between men who were intelligent enough to perceive its
values, in which there was no alloy of bribery. Bribery was written,
however, all over the first chapters of English, Irish, French, German,
and American politics; but it was high time that, in America, we had a
Court House or a City Hall, or a jail, or a post office, or a railroad,
that did not involve a political job. At some time in their lives, every
man and woman may be tempted to do wrong for compensation. It may be a
bribe of position that is offered instead of money; but it was easy to
foresee, in 1886, that there was a time coming when the most secret
transaction of private and public life would come up for public
scrutiny. Those of us who gave this warning were under suspicion of
being harmless lunatics.
Necessarily, the dishonest transactions of the bosses led to discontent
among the labouring classes, and a railroad strike came, and went, in
the winter of 1886. Its successful adjustment was a credit to capital
and labour, to our police competency, and to general municipal
common-sense. In Chicago and St. Louis, this strike lasted several days;
in Brooklyn, it was settled in a few hours. The deliverance left us
facing the problem whether the differences between capital and labour in
America would ever be settled. I was convinced that it could never be
accomplished by the law of supply and demand, although we were
constantly told so. It was a law that had done nothing to settle the
feuds of past ages. The fact was that supply and demand had gone into
partnership, proposing to swindle the earth. It is a diabolic law which
will have to stand aside for a greater law of love, of co-operation, and
of kindness. The establishment of a labour exchange, in Brooklyn in
1886, where labourers and capitalists could meet and prepare their
plans, was a step in that direction.
I said to a very wealthy man, who employed thousands of men in his
establishments in different cities:
"Have you had many strikes?"
"Never had a strike; I never will have one," he said.
"How do you avoid them?" I asked.
"When prices go up or down, I call my men together in all my
establishments. In ease of increased prosperity I range them around me
in the warehouses at the noon hour, and I say, 'Boys, I am making money,
more than usual, and I feel that you ought to share my success; I shall
add five, or ten, or twenty per cent. to your wages.' Times change. I
must sell my goods at a low price, or not sell them at all. Then I say
to them, 'Boys, I am losing money, and I must either stop altogether or
run on half-time, or do with less hands. I thought I would call you
together and ask your advice.' There may be a halt for a minute or two,
and then one of the men will step up and say, 'Boss, you have been good
to us; we have got to sympathise with you. I don't know how the others
feel, but I propose we take off 20 per cent. from our wages, and when
times get better, you can raise us,' and the rest agree."
That was the law of kindness.
Many of the best friends I had were American capitalists, and I said to
them always, "You share with your employees in your prosperity, and they
will share with you in your adversity."
The rich man of America was not in need of conversion, for, in 1886, he
had not become a monopolist as yet. He had accumulated fortunes by
industry and hard work, and he was an energetic builder of national
enterprise and civic pride, but his coffers were being drained by an
increasing social extravagance that was beyond the requirements of
happiness of home.