The chief difference between a wise man and an ignorant one is, not
that the first is acquainted with regions invisible to the second,
away from common sight and interest, but that he understands the
common things which the second only sees.
--_Sight and Insight_
[Illustration: STARR KING]
If you had chanced to live in Boston in the early Nineties, alert for
all good things in a mental and spiritual way, you would have made the
Sundays sacred to Minot Savage, Phillips Brooks and Edward Everett Hale.
Emerson says that if you know a clergyman's sect and behold his livery,
in spite of all his show of approaching the subject without prejudice,
you know beforehand exactly to what conclusions he will come. This is
what robs most sermons of their interest. Preaching, like humor, must
have in it the element of surprise. I remember with what a thrill of
delight I would sit and watch Minot Savage unwind his logic and then
gently weave it into a fabric. The man was not afraid to follow a reason
to its lair. He had a way of saying the thing for the first time--it
came as a personal message, contradicting, possibly, all that had been
said before on the subject, oblivious of precedent.
I once saw a man with a line around his waist leap from a stranded ship
into the sea, and strike out boldly for the shore. The thrill of
admiration for the act was unforgetable.
The joy of beholding a strong and valiant thinker plunge into a theme is
an event. Will he make the shore, or shall he go down to defeat before
these thousands of spectators?
When Minot Savage ceased to speak, you knew he had won--he had brought
the line safely to shore and made all secure.
Or, if you have heard Rabbi Hirsch or Felix Adler, you know the feeling.
These men make a demand upon you--you play out the line for them, and
when all is secure, there is a relief which shows you have been under an
intense strain. To paraphrase Browning, they offer no substitute, to an
idle man, for a cushioned chair and cigar.
Phillips Brooks made small demand upon his auditors. If I heard Minot
Savage in the morning and got wound up tight, as I always did, I went to
Vespers at Trinity Church for rest.
The soft, sweet playing of the organ, the subdued lights, the far-away
voices of the choir, and finally the earnest words of the speaker,
worked a psychic spell. The sermon began nowhere and ended nowhere--the
speaker was a great, gentle personality, with a heart of love for
everybody and everything. We have heard of the old lady who would go
miles to hear her pastor pronounce the word Mesopotamia, but he put no
more soul into it than did Phillips Brooks. The service was all a sort
of lullaby for tired souls--healing and helpful.
But as after every indulgence there comes a minor strain of
dissatisfaction following the awakening, so it was here--it was
beautiful while it lasted. Then eight o'clock would come and I would be
at Edward Everett Hale's. This sturdy old man, with his towering form,
rugged face and echoing bass voice, would open up the stops and give his
blessed "Mesopotamia" like a trumpet call. He never worked the soft
pedal. His first words always made me think of "Boots and Saddles!" Be a
man--do something! Why stand ye here all the day idle!
And there was love and entreaty, too, but it never lulled you into
forgetfulness. There was intellect, but it did not ask you to follow it.
The dear old man did not wind in and out among the sinuosities of
thought--no, he was right out on the broad prairie, under the open sky,
sounding "Boots and Saddles!"
In Doctor Hale's church is a most beautiful memorial window to Thomas
Starr King, who was at one time the pastor of this church. I remember
Doctor Hale once rose and pointing to that window, said: "That window is
in memory of a man! But how vain a window, how absurd a monument if the
man had not left his impress upon the hearts of humanity! That beautiful
window only mirrors our memories of the individual."
And then Doctor Hale talked, just talked for an hour about Starr King.
Doctor Hale has given that same talk or sermon every year for thirty
years: I have heard it three times, but never exactly twice alike. I
have tried to get a printed copy of the address, but have so far
failed. Yet this is sure: you can not hear Doctor Hale tell of Starr
King without a feeling that King was a most royal specimen of humanity,
and a wish down deep in your heart that you, too, might reflect some of
the sterling virtues that he possessed.
* * * * *
Starr King died in California in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-four. In Golden
Gate Park, San Francisco, is his statue in bronze. In the First
Unitarian Church of San Francisco is a tablet to his memory; in the
Unitarian Church at Oakland are many loving tokens to his personality;
and in the State House at Sacramento is his portrait and an engrossed
copy of resolutions passed by the Legislature at the time of his death,
wherein he is referred to as "the man whose matchless oratory saved
California to the Union."
"Who was Starr King?" I once asked Doctor Charles H. Leonard of Tufts
College. And the saintly old man lifted his eyes as if in prayer of
thankfulness and answered: "Starr King! Starr King! He was the gentlest
and strongest, the most gifted soul I ever knew--I bless God that I
lived just to know Starr King!"
Not long after this I asked the same question of Doctor C. A. Bartol
that I had asked Doctor Leonard, and the reply was: "He was a man who
proved the possible--in point of temper and talent, the most virile
personality that New England has produced. We call Webster our greatest
orator, but this man surpassed Webster: he had a smile that was a
benediction; a voice that was a caress. We admired Webster, but Starr
King we loved: one convinced our reason, the other captured our hearts."
The Oriental custom of presenting a thing to the friend who admires it
symbols a very great truth. If you love a thing well enough, you make it
yours.
Culture is a matter of desire; knowledge is to be had for the asking;
and education is yours if you want it. All men should have a college
education in order that they may know its worthlessness. George William
Curtis was a very prince of gentlemen, and as an orator he won by his
manner and by his gentle voice fully as much as by the orderly
procession of his thoughts.
"Oh, what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices! Whoever speaks
to me in the right voice, him or her will I follow," says Walt Whitman.
If you have ever loved a woman and you care to go back to May-time and
try to analyze the why and the wherefore, you probably will not be able
to locate the why and the wherefore, but this negative truth you will
discover: you were not won by logic. Of course you admired the woman's
intellect--it sort of matched your own, and in loving her you
complimented yourself, for thus by love and admiration do we prove our
kinship with the thing loved.
But intellect alone is too cold to fuse the heart. Something else is
required, and for lack of a better word we call it "personality." This
glowing, winning personality that inspires confidence and trust is a
bouquet of virtues, the chief flower of which is Right Intent--honesty
may be a bit old-fashioned, but do not try to leave it out.
George William Curtis and Starr King had a frank, wide-open, genuine
quality that disarmed prejudice right at the start. And both were big
enough so that they never bemoaned the fact that Fate had sent them to
the University of Hard Knocks instead of matriculating them at Harvard.
I once heard George William Curtis speak at Saint James Hall, Buffalo,
on Civil-Service Reform--a most appalling subject with which to hold a
"popular audience." He was introduced by the Honorable Sherman S.
Rogers, a man who was known for ten miles up the creek as the greatest
orator in Erie County. After the speech of introduction, Curtis stepped
to the front, laid on the reading-desk a bundle of manuscript, turned
one page, and began to talk. He talked for two hours, and never once
again referred to his manuscript--we thought he had forgotten it. He
himself tells somewhere of Edward Everett doing the same. It is fine to
have a thing and still show that you do not need it. The style of Curtis
was in such marked contrast to the bluegrass article represented by
Rogers that it seemed a rebuke. One was florid, declamatory, strong,
full of reasons: the other was keyed low--it was so melodious, so gently
persuasive, that we were thrown off our guard and didn't know we had
imbibed rank heresy until we were told so the next day by a man who was
not there. As the speaker closed, an old lady seated near me sighed
softly, adjusted her Paisley shawl and said, "That was the finest
address I ever heard, except one given in this very hall in Eighteen
Hundred Fifty-nine by Starr King."
And I said, "Well, a speech that you can remember for twenty-five years
must have been a good one!"
"It wasn't the address so much as the man," answered this mother in
Israel, and she heaved another small sigh.
And therein did the good old lady drop a confession. I doubt me much
whether any woman will remember any speech for a week--she just
remembers the man.
And this applies pretty nearly as much to men, too. Is there sex in
spirit? Hardly! Thoreau says the character of Jesus was essentially
feminine. Herbert Spencer avers, "The high intuitive quality which we
call genius is largely feminine in character." "Starr King was the child
of his mother, and his best qualities were feminine," said the Reverend
E. H. Chapin.
* * * * *
When Starr King's father died the boy was fifteen. There were five
younger children and Starr was made man of the house by Destiny's
acclaim. Responsibility ripens. This slim, slender youth became a man in
a day.
The father had been the pastor of the Charlestown Universalist Church. I
suppose it is hardly necessary to take a page and prove that this
clergyman in an unpopular church did not leave a large fortune to his
family. In truth, he left a legacy of debts. Starr King, the boy of
fifteen, left school and became clerk in a drygoods-store. The mother
cared for her household and took in sewing.
Joshua Bates, master of the Winthrop School, describes Starr King as he
was when the father's death cut off his schooldays: "Slight of build,
golden-haired, active, agile, with a homely face which everybody thought
was handsome on account of the beaming eyes, the winning smile and the
earnest desire of always wanting to do what was best and right."
This kind of boy gets along all right anywhere--God is on his side. The
hours in the drygoods-store were long, and on Saturday nights it was
nearly midnight before Starr would reach home. But there was a light in
the window for him, even if whale-oil was scarce, and the mother was at
her sewing. Together they ate their midnight lunch, and counted the
earnings of the week.
And the surprise of both that they were getting a living and paying off
the debts sort of cleared the atmosphere of its gloom.
In Burke's "Essay on the Sublime," he speaks of the quiet joy that comes
through calamity when we discover that the calamity has not really
touched us. The death of a father who leaves a penniless widow and a
hungry brood comes at first as a shock--the heavens are darkened and
hope has fled.
I know a man who was in a railroad wreck--the sleeping-car in which he
rode left the track and rolled down an embankment. There was a black
interval of horror, and then this man found himself, clad in his
underclothes, standing on the upturned car, looking up at the Pleiades
and this thought in his mind, "What beauty and peace are in these winter
heavens!" The calamity had come--he was absolutely untouched--he was
locating the constellations and surprised and happy in his ability to
enjoy them.
Starr King and his mother sipped their midnight tea and grew jolly over
the thought of their comfortable home; they were clothed and fed, the
children well and sleeping soundly in baby abandon upstairs, the debts
were being paid. They laughed, did this mother and son, really laughed
aloud, when only a month before they had thought that only gloom and
misery could ever again be theirs.
They laughed!
And soon the young man's salary was increased--people liked to trade
with him--customers came and asked that he might wait on them. He sold
more goods than anyone else in his department, and yet he never talked
things on to people. He was alert, affable, kindly, and anticipated the
wishes and wants of his customers without being subservient, fawning or
domineering.
This kind of helper is needed everywhere--the one who gives a willing
hand, who puts soul into his service, who brings a glow of good-cheer
into all his relations with men.
The doing things with a hearty enthusiasm is often what makes the doer a
marked person and his deeds effective. The most ordinary service is
dignified when it is performed in that spirit. Every employer wants
those who work for him to put heart and mind into the toil. He soon
picks out those whose souls are in their service, and gives them
evidence of his appreciation. They do not need constant watching. He can
trust them in his absence, and so the places of honor and profit
naturally gravitate to them.
The years went by, and one fine day Starr King was twenty years of age.
All of the debts were paid, the children were going to school, and
mother and son faced the world from the vantage-ground of success. Starr
had quit the drygoods trade and gone to teaching school on less salary,
so as to get more leisure for study.
Incidentally he kept books at the Navy Yard.
About this time Theodore Parker wrote to a friend in Maiden: "I can not
come to preach for you as I would like, but with your permission I will
send Thomas Starr King. This young man is not a regularly ordained
preacher, but he has the grace of God in his heart, and the gift of
tongues. He is a rare, sweet spirit, and I know that after you have met
him you will thank me for sending him to you."
Then soon we hear of Starr King's being invited to Medford to give a
Fourth of July oration, and also of his speaking in the Universalist
churches at Cambridge, Waltham, Watertown, Hingham and Salem--sent to
these places by Doctor E. H. Chapin, pastor of the Charlestown
Universalist Church, and successor to the Reverend Thomas F. King,
father of Starr King.
Starr seems to have served as a sort of assistant to Chapin, and thereby
revealed his talent and won the heart of the great man. Edwin Hubbell
Chapin was only ten years older than Starr King, and at that time had
not really discovered himself, but in discovering another he found
himself. Twenty years later Beecher and Chapin were to rival each other
for first place as America's greatest pulpit orator. These men were
always fast friends, yet when they met at convention or conference folks
came for miles to see the fire fly. "Where are you going?" once asked
Beecher of Chapin when they met by chance on Broadway. "Where am I
going?" repeated Chapin. "Why, if you are right in what you preach, you
know where I am going." But only a few years were to pass before Chapin
said in public in Beecher's presence, "I am jealous of Mr. Beecher--he
preaches a better Universalist sermon than I can." Chapin made his mark
upon the time: his sermons read as though they were written yesterday,
and carry with them a deal of the swing and onward sweep that are
usually lost when the orator attempts to write. But if Chapin had done
nothing else but discover Starr King, the drygoods-clerk, rescue him
from the clutch of commerce and back him on the orator's platform, he
deserves the gratitude of generations. And all this I say as a
businessman who fully recognizes that commerce is just as honorable and
a deal more necessary than oratory. But there were other men to sell
thread and calico, and God had special work for Thomas Starr King.
Chapin was a graduate of Bennington Seminary, the school that also
graduated the father of Robert Ingersoll. On Chapin's request Theodore
Parker, himself a Harvard man, sent Starr King over to Cambridge to
preach. Boston was a college town--filled with college traditions, and
when one thinks of sending out this untaught stripling to address
college men, we can not but admire the temerity of both Chapin and
Parker. "He has never attended a Divinity School," writes Chapin to
Deacon Obadiah B. Queer of Quincy, "but he is educated just the same. He
speaks Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and fairly good English, as you
will see. He knows natural history and he knows humanity; and if one
knows man and Nature, he comes pretty close to knowing God."
Where did this drygoods-clerk get his education? Ah, I'll tell you--he
got his education as the lion's whelp gets his. The lioness does not
send her cub away to a lioness that has no cubs in order that he may be
taught. The lion nature gets what it needs with its mother's milk and by
doing.
Schools and colleges are cumbrous makeshifts, often forcing truth on
pupils out of season, and thus making lessons grievous. "The soul knows
all things," says Emerson, "and knowledge is only a remembering." "When
the time is ripe, men know," wrote Hegel. At the last we can not teach
anything--nothing is imparted. We can not make the plants and flowers
grow--all we can do is to supply the conditions, and God does the rest.
In education we can only supply the conditions for growth--we can not
impart, nor force the germs to unfold.
Starr King's mother was his teacher. Together they read good books, and
discussed great themes. She read for him and he studied for her. She did
not treat him as a child--things that interested her she told to him.
The sunshine of her soul was reflected upon his, and thus did he grow. I
know a woman whose children will be learned, even though they never
enter a schoolroom. This woman is a companion to her children and her
mind vitalizes theirs. This does not mean that we should at once do away
with schools and colleges, but it does reveal the possible. To read and
then discuss with a strong and sympathetic intellect what you read is to
make the thought your own--it is a form of exercise that brings growth.
Starr King's mother was not a wonderful nor a famous person--I find no
mention of her in Society's Doings of the day--nothing of her dress or
equipage. If she was "superbly gowned," we do not know it; if she was
ever one of the "unbonneted," history is silent. All we know is, that
together they read Bulfinch's "Mythology," Grote's "History of Greece,"
Plutarch, Dante and Shakespeare. We know that she placed a light in the
window for him to make his home-coming cheerful, that together they
sipped their midnight tea, that together they laughed, and sometimes
wept--but not for long.
* * * * *
In Eighteen Hundred Forty-six Chapin was thirty-two years old. Starr
King was twenty-two. A call had reached Chapin to come up higher; but he
refused to leave the old church at Charlestown unless Starr King was to
succeed him. To place a young man in the position of pastor where he has
sat in the pews, his feet not reaching the floor, is most trying. Starr
King knew every individual man, woman and child in the church, and they
had known him since babyhood. In appearance he was but a boy, and the
dignity that is supposed to send conviction home was entirely wanting.
But Chapin had his way and the boy was duly ordained and installed as
pastor of the First Universalist Church of Charlestown.
The new pastor fully expected his congregation to give him "absent
treatment," but instead, the audience grew--folks even came over from
Boston to hear the boy-preacher. His sermons were carefully written, and
dealt in the simple, every-day lessons of life. To Starr King this world
is paradise enow; it's the best place of which we know, and the way for
man to help himself is to try and make it a better place. There is a
flavor of Theodore Parker in those early sermons, a trace of Thoreau and
much tincture of Emerson--and all this was to the credit of the
boy-preacher. His woman's mind absorbed things.
About that time Boston was in very fact the intellectual hub of
America. Emerson was forty-three, his "Nature" had been published
anonymously, and although it took eight years to sell this edition of
five hundred copies, the author was in demand as a lecturer, and in some
places society conceded him respectable. Wendell Phillips was addressing
audiences that alternately applauded and jeered. Thoreau had discovered
the Merrimac and explored Walden Woods; little Doctor Holmes was
peregrinating in his One-Hoss Shay, vouchsafing the confidences of his
boarding-house; Lowell was beginning to violate the rules of rhetoric;
Whittier was making his plea for the runaway slave; and throughout New
England the Lecture Lyceum was feeling its way.
A lecture course was then no vaudeville--five concerts and two lectures
to take off the curse--not that! The speakers supplied strong meat for
men. The stars in the lyceum sky were Emerson, Chapin, Beecher, Holmes,
Bartol, Phillips, Ballou, Everett and Lowell. These men made the New
England Lyceum a vast pulpit of free speech and advanced thought. And to
a degree the Lyceum made these men what they were. They influenced the
times and were influenced by the times. They were in competition with
each other. A pace had been set, a record made, and the audiences that
gathered expected much. An audience gets just what it deserves and no
more. If you have listened to a poor speech, blame yourself.
In the life of George Francis Train, he tells that in Eighteen Hundred
Forty Emerson spoke in Waltham for five dollars and four quarts of oats
for his horse--now he received twenty-five dollars. Chapin got the same,
and when the Committee could not afford this, he referred them to Starr
King, who would lecture for five dollars and supply his own horse-feed.
Two years went by and calls came for Starr King to come up higher.
Worcester would double his salary if he would take a year's course at
the Harvard Divinity School. Starr showed the letter to Chapin, and both
laughed. Worcester was satisfied with Starr King as he was, but what
would Springfield say if they called a man who had no theological
training? And then it was that Chapin said, "Divinity is not taught in
the Harvard Divinity School," which sounds like a paraphrase of Ernest
Renan's, "You will find God anywhere but in a theological seminary."
King declined the call to Worcester, but harkened to one from the Hollis
Street Church of Boston. He went over from Universalism to Unitarianism
and still remained a Universalist--and this created quite a dust among
the theologs. Little men love their denomination with a jealous
love--truth is secondary--they see microscopic difference where big men
behold only unity.
It was about this time that Starr King pronounced this classic: "The
difference between Universalism and Unitarianism is that Universalists
believe that God is too good to damn them; and the Unitarians believe
that they are too good to be damned."
At the Hollis Street Church this stripling of twenty-four now found
himself being compared with the foremost preachers of America. And the
man grew with his work, rising to the level of events. It was at the
grave of Oliver Wendell Holmes that Edward Everett Hale said, "The five
men who have influenced the literary and intellectual thought of America
most, believed in their own divinity no less than in the divinity of
Jesus of Nazareth."
The destiny of the liberal church is not to become strong and powerful,
but to make all other denominations more liberal. When Chapin accused
Beecher of preaching Universalist sermons, it was a home thrust, because
Beecher would never have preached such sermons had not Murray, Ballou,
Theodore Parker, Chapin and Starr King done so first--and Beecher
supplied the goods called for.
Starr King's voice was deep, melodious and far-reaching, and it was not
an acquired "bishop's voice"--it was his own. The biggest basso I ever
heard was just five feet high and weighed one hundred twenty in his
stockings; Brignoli, the tenor, weighed two hundred forty. Avoirdupois
as a rule lessens the volume of the voice and heightens the
register--you can't have both adipose and chest tone. Webster and Starr
King had voices very much alike, and Webster, by the way, wasn't the big
man physically that the school readers proclaim. It was his gigantic
head and the royal way he carried himself that made the Liverpool
stevedores say, "There goes the King of America."
There was no pomposity about Starr King. Doctor Bartol has said that
when King lectured in a new town his homely, boyish face always caused a
small spasm of disappointment or merriment to sweep over the audience.
But when he spoke he was a transformed being, and his deep, mellow voice
would hush the most inveterate whisperers.
For eleven years Starr King remained pastor of the Hollis Street Church.
During the last years of his pastorate he was much in demand as a
lecturer, and his voice was heard in all the principal cities as far
west as Chicago.
His lecture, "Substance and Show," deserves to rank with Wendell
Phillips' "The Lost Arts." In truth it is very much like Phillips'
lecture. In "The Lost Arts" Phillips tells in easy conversational way of
the wonderful things that once existed; and Starr King relates in the
same manner the story of some of the wonderful things that are right
here and all around us. It reveals the mind of the man, his manner and
thought, as well as any of his productions. The great speech is an
evolution, and this lecture, given many times in the Eastern States
under various titles, did not touch really high-water mark until King
reached California and had cut loose from manuscript and tradition. An
extract seems in order:
Most persons, doubtless, if you place before them a paving-stone
and a slip of paper with some writing on it, would not hesitate to
say that there is as much more substance in the rock than in the
paper as there is heaviness. Yet they might make a great mistake.
Suppose that the slip of paper contains the sentence, "God is
love"; or, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"; or, "All men
have moral rights by reason of heavenly parentage," then the paper
represents more force and substance than the stone. Heaven and
earth may pass away, but such words can never die out or become
less real.
The word "substance" means that which stands under and supports
anything else. Whatever then creates, upholds, classifies anything
which our senses behold, though we can not handle, see, taste or
smell it, is more substantial than the object itself. In this way
the soul which vivifies, moves and supports the body is a more
potent substance than the hard bones and heavy flesh which it
vitalizes. A ten-pound weight falling on your head affects you
unpleasantly as substance, much more so than a leaf of the New
Testament, if dropped in the same direction; but there is a way in
which a page of the New Testament may fall upon a nation and split
it, or infuse itself into its bulk and give it strength and
permanence. We should be careful, therefore, what test we adopt in
order to decide the relative stability of things.
There is a very general tendency to deny that ideal forces have any
practical power. But there have been several thinkers whose
skepticism has an opposite direction. "We can not," they say,
"attribute external reality to the sensations we feel." We need
not wonder that this theory has failed to convince the
unmetaphysical common-sense of people that a stone post is merely a
stubborn thought, and that the bite of a dog is nothing but an
acquaintance with a pugnacious, four-footed conception. When a man
falls downstairs it is not easy to convince him that his thought
simply tumbles along an inclined series of perceptions and comes to
a conclusion that breaks his head; least of all, can you induce a
man to believe that the scolding of his wife is nothing but the
buzzing of his own waspish thoughts, and her too free use of his
purse only the loss of some golden fancies from his memory. We are
all safe against such idealism as Bishop Berkeley reasoned out so
logically. Byron's refutation of it is neat and witty:
"When Bishop Berkeley says there is no matter,
It is no matter what Bishop Berkeley says."
And yet, by more satisfactory evidence than that which the
idealists propose, we are warned against confounding the conception
of substance with matter, and confining it to things we can see and
grasp. Science steps in and shows us that the physical system of
things leans on spirit. We talk of the world of matter, but there
is no such world. Everything about us is a mixture or marriage of
matter and spirit. A world of matter--there would be no motion, no
force, no form, no order, no beauty, in the universe as it now is;
organization meets us at every step and wherever we look;
organization implies spirit--something that rules, disposes,
penetrates and vivifies matter.
See what a sermon astronomy preaches as to the substantial power of
invisible things. If the visible universe is so stupendous, what
shall we think of the unseen force and vitality in whose arms all
its splendors rest? It is no gigantic Atlas, as the Greeks fancied,
that upholds the celestial sphere; all the constellations are kept
from falling by an impalpable energy that uses no muscles and no
masonry. The ancient mathematician, Archimedes, once said, "Give me
a foot of ground outside the globe to stand upon, and I will make a
lever that will lift the world." The invisible lever of
gravitation, however, without any fulcrum or purchase, does lift
the globe, and makes it waltz, too, with its blonde lunar partner,
twelve hundred miles a minute to the music of the sun--ay, and
heaves sun and systems and Milky Way in majestic cotillions on its
ethereal floor.
You grasp an iron ball, and call it hard; it is not the iron that
is hard, but cohesive force that packs the particles of metal into
intense sociability. Let the force abate, and the same metal
becomes like mush; let it disappear, and the ball is a heap of
powder which your breath scatters in the air. If the cohesive
energy in Nature should get tired and unclench its grasp of matter,
our earth would instantly become "a great slump"; so that which we
tread on is not material substance, but matter braced up by a
spiritual substance, for which it serves as the form and show.
All the peculiarities of rock and glass, diamond, ice and crystal
are due to the working of unseen military forces that employ
themselves under ground--in caverns, beneath rivers, in mountain
crypts, and through the coldest nights, drilling companies of
atoms into crystalline battalions and squares, and every caprice of
a fantastic order.
When we turn to the vegetable kingdom, is not the revelation still
more wonderful? The forms which we see grow out of substances and
are supported by forces which we do not see. The stuff out of which
all vegetable appearances are made is reducible to oxygen,
hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen. How does it happen that this common
stock is worked up in such different ways? Why is a lily woven out
of it in one place and a dahlia in another, a grapevine here, and a
honeysuckle there--the orange in Italy, the palm in Egypt, the
olive in Greece and the pine in Maine? Simply because a subtile
force of a peculiar kind is at work wherever any vegetable
structure adorns the ground, and takes to itself its favorite robe.
We have outgrown the charming fancy of the Greeks that every tree
has its Dryad that lives in it, animates it, and dies when the tree
withers. But we ought, for the truth's sake, to believe that a
life-spirit inhabits every flower and shrub, and protects it
against the prowling forces of destruction. Look at a full-sized
oak, the rooted Leviathan of the fields. Judging by your senses and
by the scales, you would say that the substance of the noble tree
was its bulk of bark and bough and branch and leaves and sap, the
cords of woody and moist matter that compose it and make it heavy.
But really its substance is that which makes it an oak, that which
weaves its bark and glues it to the stem, and wraps its rings of
fresh wood around the trunk every year, and pushes out its boughs
and clothes its twigs with breathing leaves and sucks up nutriment
from the soil continually, and makes the roots clench the ground
with their fibrous fingers as a purchase against the storm, and at
last holds aloft its tons of matter against the constant tug and
wrath of gravitation, and swings its Briarean arms in triumph, in
defiance of the gale. Were it not for this energetic essence that
crouches in the acorn and stretches its limbs every year, there
would be no oak; the matter that clothes it would enjoy its stupid
slumber; and when the forest monarch stands up in his sinewy,
lordliest pride, let the pervading life-power, and its vassal
forces that weigh nothing at all, be annihilated, and the whole
structure would wither in a second to inorganic dust. So every
gigantic fact in Nature is the index and vesture of a gigantic
force. Everything which we call organization that spots the
landscape of Nature is a revelation of secret force that has been
wedded to matter, and if the spiritual powers that have thus
domesticated themselves around us should be canceled, the whole
planet would be a huge Desert of Sahara--a bleak sand-ball, without
shrub, grass-blade or moss.
As we rise in the scale of forces towards greater subtility, the
forces become more important and efficient. Water is more
intimately concerned with life than rock, air higher in the rank of
service than water, electric and magnetic agencies more powerful
than air; and light, the most delicate, is the supreme magician of
all. Just think how much expenditure of mechanical strength is
necessary to water a city in the hot summer months. What pumping
and tugging and wearisome trudging of horses with the great
sprinklers over the tedious pavement! But see by what beautiful
and noiseless force Nature waters the world! The sun looks steadily
on the ocean, and its beams lift lakes of water into the air,
tossing it up thousands of feet with their delicate fingers, and
carefully picking every grain of salt from it before they let it
go. No granite reservoirs are needed to hold in the Cochituates and
Crotons of the atmosphere, but the soft outlines of the clouds hem
in the vast weight of the upper tides that are to cool the globe,
and the winds harness themselves as steeds to the silken caldrons
and hurry them along through space, while they disburse their
rivers of moisture from their great height so lightly that seldom a
violet is crushed by the rudeness with which the stream descends.
Our conceptions of strength and endurance are so associated with
visible implements and mechanical arrangements that it is hard to
divorce them, and yet the stream of electric fire that splits an
ash is not a ponderable thing, and the way in which the lodestone
reaches the ten-pound weight and makes it jump is not perceptible.
You would think the man had pretty good molars that should gnaw a
spike like a stick of candy, but a bottle of innocent-looking
hydrogen-gas will chew up a piece of bar-iron as though it were
some favorite Cavendish.
The prominent lesson of science to men, therefore, is faith in the
intangible and invisible. Shall we talk of matter as the great
reality of the world, the prominent substance? It is nothing but
the battleground of terrific forces. Every particle of matter, the
chemists tell us, is strained up to its last degree of endurance.
The glistening bead of dew from which the daisy gently nurses its
strength, and which a sunbeam may dissipate, is the globular
compromise of antagonistic powers that would shake this building in
their unchained rage. And so every atom of matter is the slave of
imperious masters that never let it alone. It is nursed and
caressed, next bandied about, and soon cuffed and kicked by its
invisible overseers. Poor atoms! No abolition societies will ever
free them from their bondage, no colonization movement waft them to
any physical Liberia. For every particle of matter is bound by
eternal fealty to some spiritual lords, to be pinched by one and
squeezed by another and torn asunder by a third; now to be painted
by this and now blistered by that; now tormented with heat and soon
chilled with cold; hurried from the Arctic Circle to sweat at the
Equator, and then sent on an errand to the Southern Pole; forced
through transmigrations of fish, fowl and flesh; and, if in some
corner of creation the poor thing finds leisure to die, searched
out and whipped to life again and kept in its constant round.
Thus the stuff that we weigh, handle and tread upon is only the
show of invisible substances, the facts over which subtle and
mighty forces rule.
* * * * *
Starr King was that kind of plant which needs to be repotted in order to
make it flower at its very best. Events kept tugging to loosen his
tendrils from his early environments. People who live on Boston Bay like
to remain there. We have all heard of the good woman who died and went
to Heaven, and after a short sojourn there was asked how she liked it,
and she sighed and said, "Ah, yes, it is very beautiful, but it isn't
East Somerville!"
Had Starr King consented to remain in Boston he might have held his
charge against the ravages of time, secreted a curate, taken on a
becoming buffer of adipose, and glided off by imperceptible degrees on
to the Superannuated List.
But early in that historic month of April, Eighteen Hundred Sixty-one,
he set sail for California, having accepted a call from the First
Unitarian Church of San Francisco. This was his first trip to the
Pacific Coast, but New England people had preceded him, and not being
able to return, they wanted Boston to come to them. The journey was made
by the way of Panama, without any special event. The pilot who met the
ship outside of Golden Gate bore them the first news that Sumter had
been fired upon, and the bombardment was at the time when the ship that
bore Starr King was only a few miles from South Carolina's coast.
With prophetic vision Starr King saw the struggle that was to come, and
the words of Webster, uttered many years before, rushed to his lips:
"When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in
heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments
of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent;
on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal
blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the
gorgeous ensign of the republic now known and honored throughout the
earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in
their original luster, not a stripe erased nor polluted, nor a single
star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as
'What is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly,
'Liberty first and Union afterwards'; but everywhere, spread over all in
characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they
float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole
heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American
heart--Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"
The landing was made on Saturday, and the following day Starr King spoke
for the first time in California. An hour before the service was to
begin, the church was wedged tight. The preacher had much difficulty in
making his way through the dense mass of humanity to reach the pulpit.
"Is that the man?" went up the smothered exclamation, as Starr King
reached the platform and faced his audience. His slight, slender figure
and boyish face were plainly a disappointment, but this was not to last.
The preacher had prepared a sermon--such a sermon as he had given many
times to well-dressed, orderly and cultured Boston.
And if this California audience was surprised, the speaker also was no
less. The men to women were as seven to one. He saw before him a sea of
bronzed and bearded faces, earnest, attentive and hungry for truth.
There were occasional marks of dissipation and the riot of the senses,
softened by excess into penitence--whipped out and homesick. Here were
miners in red-flannel shirts, sailors, soldiers in uniform and soldiers
of fortune. The preacher looked at the motley mass in a vain attempt to
pick out his old friends from New England. The genteel, slightly blase
quality of culture that leans back in its cushioned pew and courteously
waits to be instructed, was not there. These people did not lean back:
they leaned forward, and with parted lips they listened for every word.
There was no choir, and when "an old familiar hymn" was lined off by a
volunteer who knew his business, that great audience arose and sang as
though it would shake the rafters of heaven.
Those who go down to the sea in ships, sing; shepherds who tend their
flocks by night, sing; men in the forest or those who follow the
trackless plains, sing. Congregational singing is most popular among
those who live far apart--to get together and sing is a solace.
Loneliness, separation and heart-hunger all drive men into song.
These men, many of them far from home, lifted up their voices, and the
sounds surged through that church and echoed, surged again and caught
even the preacher in their winding waves. He started in to give one
sermon and gave another. The audience, the time, the place, acted upon
him.
Oratory is essentially a pioneer product, a rustic article. Great
sermons and great speeches are given only to people who have come from
afar.
Starr King forgot his manuscript and pulpit manners. His deep voice
throbbed and pulsed with emotion, and the tensity of the times was upon
him. Without once referring directly to Sumter, his address was a call
to arms.
He spoke for an hour, and when he sat down he knew that he had won. The
next Sunday the place was again packed, and then followed urgent
invitations that he should speak during the week in a larger hall.
California was trembling in the balances, and orators were not wanting
to give out the arguments of Calhoun. They showed that the right of
secession was plainly provided for in the Constitution. Lincoln's call
for troops was coldly received, and from several San Francisco pulpits
orthodox clergymen were expressing deep regret that the President was
plunging the country into civil war.
The heart of Starr King burned with shame--to him there was but one side
to this question--the Union must be preserved.
One man who had known King in Massachusetts wrote back home saying: "You
would not know Starr King--he is not the orderly man of genteel culture
you once had in Boston. He is a torrent of eloquence, so heartfelt, so
convincing, so powerful, that when he speaks on Sunday afternoon out on
the sand-hills, he excites the multitude into a whirlwind of applause,
with a basso undertone of dissent, which, however, seems to grow
gradually less."
Loyalty to the Union was to him the one vital issue. His fight was not
with individuals--he made no personal issues. And in several joint
debates his courteous treatment of his adversary won converts for his
cause. He took pains to say that personally he had only friendship and
pity for the individuals who upheld secession and slavery--"The man in
the wrong needs friends as never before, since he has ceased to be his
own. Do we blame a blind man whom we see rushing towards a precipice?"
From that first Sunday he preached in San Francisco, his life was an
ovation wherever he went. Wherever he was advertised to speak,
multitudes were there to hang upon his words. He spoke in all the
principal towns of California; and often on the plains, in the
mountains, or by the seashore, men would gather from hundreds of miles
to hear him.
He gave himself, and before he had been in California a year, the State
was safe for the Union, and men and treasure were being sent to
Lincoln's aid. The fame of Starr King reached the President, and he
found time to write several letters to the orator, thanking him for what
he had done. It was in one of these letters that Lincoln wrote, "The
only sermons I have ever been able to read and enjoy are those of John
Murray"--a statement which some have attempted to smile away as showing
the Rail-Splitter's astute diplomacy.
Starr King gave his life to the Cause. He as much died for the Union as
though he had fallen stricken by flying lead upon the field. And he knew
what he was doing, but in answer to his warning friends he said, "I have
only one life to live and now is my time to spend it."
For three years, lacking two months, he spoke and preached several times
every week. All he made and all he was he freely gave.
For that frail frame this life of intensity had but one end.
The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued, but Lee's surrender was
yet to be.
"May I live to see unity and peace for my country," was the constant
prayer of the devoted preacher.
Starr King died March Fourth, Eighteen Hundred Sixty-four, aged forty
years. The closing words of his lecture on Socrates might well be
applied to himself: "Down the river of Life, by its Athenian banks, he
had floated upon his raft of reason serene, in cloudy as in smiling
weather. And now the night is rushing down, and he has reached the mouth
of the stream, and the great ocean is before him, dim-heaving in the
dusk. But he betrays no fear. There is land ahead, he thought; eternal
continents there are, that rise in constant light beyond the gloom. He
trusted still in the raft his soul had built, and with a brave farewell
to the true friends who stood by him on the shore, he put out into the
darkness, a moral Columbus, trusting in his haven on the faith of an
idea."