THE HOME AT ALWINGTON.
It was a remarkable coincidence that Mr. Coffin was to exchange worlds
and transfer his work in the very year in which the issues of the
Civil War were to be eliminated from national politics, when not one
of the several party platforms was to make any allusion to the
struggle of 1861-65, or to any of its numerous legacies. In this year,
1896, also, for the first time since 1860, Southern men, the one a
Confederate general, and the other a Populist editor, were to be
nominated for possible chief magistracy. Mr. Coffin, with prescience,
had already seen that the war issues, grand as they were, had melted
away into even vaster national questions. He had turned his thoughts
towards the solution of problems which concerned the nation as a whole
and humanity as a race. His historical addresses and lectures went
back to older subjects, while his thoughts soared forward to the
newer conditions, theories, and problems which were looming in the
slowly unveiling future. In literature he turned, and gladly, too,
from the scenes of slavery and war between brothers. With his pen he
sought to picture the ancient heroisms, in the story of which the
people of the States of rice and cotton, as well as of granite, ice,
and grain, were alike interested, as in a common heritage. In
Alwington, surrounded by old and new friends, genial and cultured, he
hoped, if it were God's will, to complete his work with a rotunda-like
series of pen pictures of the Revolution.
This was not to be, though he was to die "in harness," like Nicanor of
old, without lingering illness or broken powers. While he was to see
not a few golden days of A. D. 1896, yet the proposed pictures were to
be left upon the easel, scarcely more than begun. The pen and ink on
his table were to remain, like brushes on the palette, with none to
finish as the master-workman had planned.
Months before that date of February 18th, on which their golden
wedding was to be celebrated, Mr. and Mrs. Coffin had secured my
promise that I should be present. Coming on to Boston, I led the
morning worship in the Eliot Church of Newton, which is named after
the apostle of the Indians, the quarter-millennial anniversary of the
beginning of whose work at Nonantum has just been celebrated. In the
afternoon, I had the pleasure of looking into the faces of three score
or more of my former Shawmut parishioners in the Casino hall in
Beaconsfield Terrace.
Mr. Coffin had, from the first, fully agreed with the writer in
believing that a Congregational church should be formed in the
Reservoir district, which had, he predicted, a brilliant and
substantial future. He was among the very first to move for the sale
of the old property on Tremont Street, and he personally prepared the
petition to the Legislature of Massachusetts for permission to sell
and move. Afterwards, when the new enterprise seemed to have been
abandoned, he listened to the call of duty and remained in Shawmut
Church. When he became a resident in Brookline, feeling it still his
duty to work and toil, to break new paths, to make the road straight
for his Master, rather than to sit down at ease in Zion, he cast his
lot in with a little company of those who, though few and without
wealth, bravely and hopefully resolved to form a church where it was
needed. On November 3d, they first gathered for worship, and one year
later, November 4, 1896, the church was formed, with Rev. Harris G.
Hale as pastor, and taking the historic, appropriate, but uncommon
name, Leyden. Their first collection of money, as a thank-offering to
God, was for Foreign Missions.
On that afternoon of February 16th, Carleton was present, joining
heartily in the worship. As usual, he listened with that wonderfully
luminous face of his and that close attention to the discourse, which,
like the cable-ships, ran out unseen telegraphy of sympathy. The
service, and the usual warm grasping of hands and those pleasant
social exchanges for which the Shawmut people were so noted, being
over, some fifteen or twenty gathered in the hospitable library of M.
F. Dickinson, Jr., whose home was but a few rods off, on the other
side of Beacon Street. After a half hour of sparkling reminiscences of
the dear old days in Shawmut, all had gone except the host, Mr.
Coffin, and the biographer, who then had not even a passing thought
of the work he was soon to do. As Carleton sat there in an easy chair
before the wood-fire on the open hearth, his feet stretched out
comfortably upon the tiles, and his two hands, with their finger and
thumb tips together, as was his usual custom when good thinking and
pleasant conversation went on together, he talked about the future of
Boston and of Congregational Christianity.
Interested as I was, a sudden feeling of pain seized me as I noticed
how sunken were his eyes. I am not a physician, but I have seen many
people die. I have looked upon many more as they approached their
mortal end, marked with signs which they saw not, nor often even their
friends observed, but which were as plain and readable as the
stencilled directions upon freight to be sent and delivered elsewhere.
After a handshake and an invitation from him to dine the next night at
his house, and to be at the golden wedding on Tuesday, we bade him
good afternoon. On returning with my host in front of the fire, I
said, "I feel sad, for our friend Mr. Coffin is marked for early
death; he will certainly not outlive this year."
Nevertheless, I could not but count Charles Carleton Coffin among the
number of those whom God made rich in the threefold life of body,
soul, and spirit.
The old Greeks, whose wonderfully rich experience of life, penetrating
insight, powers of analysis, and gift of literary expression enabled
them to coin the words to fitly represent their thoughts, knew how to
describe both love and life better than we, having a mintage of
thought for each in its threefold form. As they discriminated _eros_,
_phile_, and _agape_ in love, so also they put difference between
_psyche_, _bios_, and _zoe_ in life.
What other ranges of existence and developments of being there may be
for God's chosen ones in worlds to come, we dare not conjecture, but
this we know. Carleton had even then, as I saw him marked for an early
change of worlds, entered into threefold life.
1. The lusty boy and youth, the mature man with not a perfect, yet a
sound, physical organization, showed a good specimen of the human
animal, rich in the breath of life,--_psyche_.
2. The long and varied career of farmer, surveyor, citizen, Christian
interested in his fellows and their welfare, with varied work, travel,
and adventure, manifested the noble _bios_,--the career or course of
strenuous endeavor.
3. The spiritual attainments in character, the ever outflowing
benevolence, the kindly thought, the healing sunshine of his presence,
the calm faith, the firm trust in God, gave assurance of the _zoe_.
These three stages of existence revealed Carleton as one affluent with
what men call life, and of which the young ever crave more, and also
in that "life which is life indeed," which survives death, which is
the extinction of the _psyche_ or animal breath,--the soul remaining
as the abode of the spirit. In body, soul, and spirit, Charles
Carleton Coffin was a true man, who, even in the evening of life, was
rich in those three forms of life which God has revealed and
discriminated through the illuminating Greek language of the New
Testament.
True indeed it was that, while with multiplying years the animal life
lessened in quantity and intensity, the spiritual life was enriched
and deepened; or, to put it in Paul's language and in the historical
present so favored by Carleton, "While the outward man perisheth, the
inward man is renewed day by day."