GREAT MEN.
Ruth Erskine, with her skirts gathered daintily around her, to avoid
contact with the unclean earth, made her way skill fully through the
crowd, and with the aid of a determined spirit and a camp-chair secured
a place and a seat very near the stand. The little lady who timidly
followed in her lead was not quite so fortunate, inasmuch as she had no
camp-chair, and was less resolved in her determination to get ahead of
those who had arrived earlier; so she contented herself with a damp seat
on the end of a board, which was vacated for her use by a courteous
gentleman.
Ruth, you must understand, was not selfish in this matter because she
had planned to be, but simply because it had never occurred to her to be
otherwise, which is one of the misfortunes that come to people who are
educated in a selfish atmosphere. Ruth Erskine had come to this meeting
fully prepared to enjoy it. Dr. Cuyler was a star of sufficient
magnitude to attract her. During her frequent visits to New York she had
heard much of but had never seen him. The people whom she visited were
too elegant in their views and practices to have much in common with the
church which was so pronounced on the two great questions of religion
and temperance. Yet, even with them, Dr. Cuyler and Dr. Cuyler's great
church were eccentricities to be tolerated, not ignored. Therefore Ruth
had had it in her heart to enjoy listening to him sometime. The sometime
had arrived. She had dressed herself with unusual care, a ceremony which
seemed to be quite in the background among the people who were at home
at Chautauqua. But someway it seemed to Ruth that the great Brooklyn
pastor should receive this mark of respect at her hands; so she had
spent the morning at her toilet and was now a fashionable lady,
fashionably attired for church.
If the people who vouchsafed her a glance as she crowded past indulged,
some of them, in a smile at her expense, and thought the simple temple
made of trees and grasses an inappropriate surrounding to her silken
robes and costly lace mantle, she was none the wiser for that, you know,
and took her seat, indifferent to them all, except that presently there
stole over her the sense of disagreeable incongruity with her outdoor
surroundings; so Satan had the pleasure of ruffling her spirits and
occupying her thoughts with her rich brown silk dress instead of letting
her heart be touched with the solemnity and beauty of the grand hymn
which rolled down those long aisles. Satan has that everlasting weapon,
"What to wear, and what not to wear," everlastingly at command and
wonderfully under his control. But Ruth, in her way, was strong-minded
and could control her thoughts when she chose; so she presently shook
off the feeling of annoyance and decided to give herself up to the
influences of the hour.
By this time Dr. Cuyler appeared and was introduced, Ruth gave him the
benefit of a very searching gaze, and decided that he was the very last
man of all those on the platform whom she would have selected as the
speaker. Probably if Dr. Cuyler had known this, and known also that his
personal presence entirely disappointed her, he would not have been
greatly disconcerted thereby. But his subject was one that found an
answering thrill in this young lady's heart--"Some Talks I Have Had With
Great Men." Ruth liked greatness. In her calm, composed way she bowed
before it. She would have enjoyed being great. Celebrity in a majestic,
dignified form would have been her delight. She by no means admitted
this, as Eurie Mitchell so often did. She by no means sought after it in
the small ways within her reach. Small ways did not suit her; they
disgusted her. But if she could have flashed into splendid greatness, if
by any amount of laborious study, or work, or suffering, she could have
seen the way to world-wide renown she would have grasped for it in an
instant.
The next best thing to being renowned one's self was to have renowned
people for friends. This was another thing that Ruth coveted in silence.
She wanted no one to know how earnestly she aspired to, sometime,
making the acquaintance of some of the great people not--the vulgarly
great, those who were in a sense, and in the eyes of a few, great
because of the accidents of fortune and travel. She knew such by the
scores. Indeed, she had been in circles many a time where _she_ shone
with that sort of greatness herself. Perhaps it was for that reason that
it was such a despised height to her. But she meant the _really_ great
people of this world--people of power, people who moved the masses by
the force of their brains. Not one such had she ever met to look upon as
an acquaintance; and here was this man telling off the honored names by
the score, and saying, "My friend, Dr. Guthrie"--"My good friend, Thomas
Carlyle"--"My dear brother, Newman Hall." How would it seem to stand in
intimate relationship with one single gifted mind like these, and was
she destined ever to know by actual experience?
There was another reason why Ruth had desired to choose Dr. Cuyler to
listen to rather than some other names on the programme, because, from
the nature of his subject she had judged it most unlikely that he
should have about him any arrows that would touch home to her. Not that
she put it in that language; she did not admit even to herself that any
of the solemn words that had been spoken at Chautauqua had reference to
her; and yet in a vague, fitful way she was ill at ease.
She had moments of feeling that there was a reach of happiness possessed
by these people of which she knew nothing. Little side thrusts had come
to her from time to time in places where she least expected them. That
question, asked by Flossy during her night of unrest, "Should you be
afraid to die?" hovered around this quietly poised young lady in a most
unaccountable manner. All the more persistently did it cling because she
could not shake it off with the thought that it was silly. Common sense
told her that the strange, solemn shadow, which came so steadily after
men, and so surely enveloped one after another among the grandest
intellects that the world owned, was not a thing to pass over lightly.
After all, why should she _not_ be afraid of death? Then that strange
gentleman who had persisted in ranking her among the praying people! he
had left his shadow. Why did she not pray? She wondered over this in a
vague sort of way; wondered how it seemed to kneel down alone, and speak
to an invisible presence; wondered if those who so knelt always felt as
though they were really speaking to God.
There were times when Ruth was exceedingly disgusted with these
perplexing thoughts, and wanted nothing so much as to get away from
them. She resented this intrusion upon her quiet. This day was one of
those in which she was impatient of all these things, and she had made
her toilet with great satisfaction, and said within herself
complacently: "We are to have one hour at last devoted to this mundane
sphere and the mortals who inhabit it; most of the time these
Chautauquans talk and act as though earth was only a railroad station,
where people changed cars and went on to heaven. Dr. Cuyler is going to
refresh us with some actual living specimens of humanity. He can't make
a sermon out of that subject if he tries."
But Ruth Erskine had not measured the power of the earnest preachers of
Jesus Christ. As if Dr. Cuyler could talk for an hour to thousands of
immortal souls, and leave Christ and heaven and immortality out.
To Ruth these three words constituted a sermon, and she got them that
day. Not that he had an idea that he was preaching Christ, except
incidentally, as a man refers almost unconsciously to the one whom he
loves best in all the world but Ruth knew he was. It came in little
sudden touches when she least expected it, when heart and soul were
wrought upon with some strong enthusiasm by the splendid picture of a
splendid man--as when he told of Spurgeon. It was a glowing description,
such as thrilled Ruth, and made her feel that to have just one glimpse
of that great man, with his great marvelous power over humanity, would
be worth a lifetime.
Suddenly the speaker said: "The secret of that man's power lies, first,
in his study of the Bible." Ruth started and came down like a bomb-shell
from her wondrous height. The Bible! copies of which lay carelessly on
every table of her father's elegantly furnished house unstudied and
unthought of. How very strange to ascribe the power of the great
intellect to the study of one book that was more or less familiar to
every Sunday-school boy. "Second, in short, simple, homely language."
Ruth smiled now. Dr. Cuyler was growing absurd, as if it were not the
most common thing in the world to use simple, homely language! No
Spurgeons could be manufactured in that way, she was sure. "Third,
mighty earnestness to save souls." Here was a point concerning which
Ruth knew nothing.
Dr. Cuyler's manner put tremendous force into the forceful words, and
carried conviction with them. She wondered how a really _mighty_
earnestness to save souls made a man appear? She wondered whether she
had ever seen such a one; she went rapidly over the list of her
acquaintances in the church. She smiled to herself a sarcastic,
contemptuous smile; she had met them all at parties, concerts,
festivals, and the like; she had seen them on occasions when _nothing_
seemed to possess them but to have a good time like the rest of the
world.
Like the rest of the world, Ruth reasoned and decided from her chance
meetings with the outside life of these Christians, forgetting that she
had never seen one of them in their closets before God; rather, she
knew nothing about these closets, nor the experiences learned there, and
could only reason from outside life. This being the case, what a pity
that her verdict of those lives should have called forth only that
contemptuous smile! Wandering off in this train of thought, she lost the
speaker's next point, but was called back by his solemn, ringing close.
"Put these together, melt them down with the love of Christ, and you
have a Spurgeon. God be thanked for such a piece of hand work as he!"
Another start and another retrospect. _Did_ she know any people who put
these together; who made a real, earnest, constant study of the Bible as
school girls studied their Latin grammars, and who were really eager to
save souls because they had the love of Christ in their hearts, and who
said so in plain simple language? "Does he, I wonder?" she said to
herself. "I wonder if his sermons sound like that? I should like to hear
him preach just once. Oh, dear! if he isn't running off to Moody and
Sankey. It _is_ a sermon after all!"
On the whole, Ruth was disgusted. Her brain was in a whirl; she was
being compelled to hear _sermons_ on every hand. She was sick of it.
They had been great men of whom she had heard, and she admired them all;
she wanted the secret of their power, but she didn't want it to be made
out of such commonplace material as was in the hands of every child. She
did not know what she wanted--only that she had come out to be
entertained and to revel in her love of heroes, and she had been pinned
down to the one thought that _real_ men were made of those who found
their power in their Bible and on their knees.
The solemn, earnest, tender closing to this address did not lessen her
sense of discomfort. Then just beside her was carried on a conversation
that added to her annoyance.
"They are big men," a man said. He was dressed in a common business
suit; his linen had not the exquisite freshness about it that her
fastidious eyes delighted in; his hands looked as though they might have
been used to work that was rough and hard; his straggling hair was
sprinkled with gray, and there was not a striking feature about him.
"They are big men," he said, "and I've no doubt it is a big thing to
know them, and talk with them, and have a friendly feeling for each, as
if they belonged to him, but he knows a bigger one than them, and the
best of it is, so do we. The Lord Jesus Christ, our Elder Brother, is
not to be compared to common men like these."
And now Ruth's lips curled utterly. She was an aristocrat without
knowing it. She believed in Christianity, and in its power to save the
poor and the commonest, but this insufferable assumption of dignity and
superiority over the rest of the world, as she called it, was hateful to
her in the extreme. It would have startled her exceedingly to have been
told that she was angry with the man for presuming to place _his_ Friend
higher in the list of great ones than any of those given that day; and
yet such was actually her feeling. She swept her skirts angrily away
from contact with the man, and spoke so crustily to the little lady who
had come in her wake that she moved timidly away.
Just at her left were two gentlemen shaking hands. Both had been on the
stand together, she knew the faces of both, and _one_ ranked just a
trifle higher in her estimation than any one at Chautauqua. She edged a
little nearer. She lived in the hope of making the acquaintance of some
of these lights, just enough acquaintance to receive a bow and a clasp
of the hand, though how one could accomplish it who was determined that
her interest in them should neither be seen nor suspected, it would be
hard to say; but they were talking in eager, hearty tones, not at all as
if their words were confidential--at least she might have the benefit of
them.
"That was a capital lecture," the elder of the two was saying. "Cuyler
has had great advantages in his life in meeting on a familiar footing so
many of our great men. When you get thinking of these things, and of the
many men whom you would like to know intimately, what is the thought
that strikes you most forcibly?"
"That I am glad I belong to the 'royal family,' and have the opportunity
of knowing intimately and holding close personal relations with Him who
'spake as never man spake.'"
The other answered in a rare, rich tone of suppressed jubilance of
feeling.
"Exactly!" his friend said; "and when you can leave the fullness of
that thought long enough to take another, there is the looking forward
to actual fellowship and communion not only with him, but with all these
glorious men who are living here, and who have gone up yonder."
Ruth turned abruptly away. The very thought that possessed the heart of
the plain-looking man and that so annoyed her; and these two, whom to
know was an honor, were looking forward to that consummation as the
height of it all!