[358]I feel that I cannot close this memoir without reprinting the
beautiful tribute paid to my father by Dr. Bellows, in his address
at the fifty-fourth anniversary of the founding of the Church of the
Messiah, in New York, in 1879. After comparing him with Dr. Channing,
and describing the fragile appearance of the latter, he said:
"Dewey, reared in the country, among plain but not common people,
squarely built, and in the enjoyment of what seemed robust health,
had, when I first saw him, at forty years of age, a massive dignity
of person; strong features, a magnificent height of head, a carriage
almost royal; a voice deep and solemn; a face capable of the utmost
expression, and an action which the greatest tragedian could not have
much improved. These were not arts and attainments, but native gifts of
person and temperament. An intellect of the first class had fallen upon
a spiritual nature tenderly alive to the sense of divine realities. His
awe and reverence were native, and they have proved indestructible. He
did not so much seek religion as religion sought him. His nature was
characterized from early youth by a union of massive intellectual power
with an almost feminine sensibility; a poetic imagination with a rare
dramatic faculty of representation. Diligent as a scholar, a careful
thinker, accustomed to test his own impressions by patient meditation,
a reasoner of the most cautious kind; capable of holding doubtful
conclusions, however inviting, in suspense; devout and reverent by
nature,--he had every qualification for a great preacher, in a time
when the old foundations were broken up and men's minds were demanding
guidance and support in the critical transition from the [359] days of
pure authority to the days of personal conviction by rational evidence.
"Dewey has from the beginning been the most truly human of our
preachers. Nobody has felt so fully the providential variety of mortal
passions, exposures, the beauty and happiness of our earthly life,
the lawfulness of our ordinary pursuits, the significance of home, of
business, of pleasure, of society, of politics. He has made himself
the attorney of human nature, defending and justifying it in all the
hostile suits brought against it by imperfect sympathy, by theological
acrimony, by false dogmas. Yet he never was for a moment the apologist
of selfishness, vice, or folly; no stricter moralist than he is to
be found; no worshipper of veracity more faithful; no wiser or more
tender pleader of the claims of reverence and self-consecration! In
fact, it was the richness of his reverence and the breadth of his
religion that enabled him to throw the mantle of his sympathy over
the whole of human life. He has accordingly, of all preachers in this
country, been the one most approved by the few who may be called
whole men,--men who rise above the prejudice of sect and the halfness
of pietism,--lawyers and judges, statesmen and great merchants, and
strong men of all professions. He could stir and awe and instruct the
students of Cambridge, as no man I ever heard in that pulpit, not
even Dr. Walker,--who satisfied conscience and intellect, but was not
wholly fair either to passion or to sentiment, much less to the human
body and the world. Of all religious men I have known, the broadest
and most catholic is Dewey,--I say religious men, for it is easy to be
broad and catholic, with indifference and apathy at the heart. Dewey
has cared unspeakably for divine [360] things,-thirsted for God, and
dwelt in daily reverence and aspiration before him; and out of his awe
and his devotion he has looked with the tenderest eyes of sympathy,
forbearance, and patience upon the world and the ways of men; slow to
rebuke utterly, always finding the soul of goodness in things evil, and
never assuming any sanctimonious ways, or thinking himself better than
his brethren.
"Dewey is undoubtedly the founder and most conspicuous example of
what is best in the modern school of preaching. The characteristic
feature is the effort to carry the inspiration, the correction, and
the riches of Christian faith into the whole sphere of human life; to
make religion practical, without lowering its ideal; to proclaim our
present world and our mortal life as the field of its influence and
realization, trusting that what best fits men to live and employ and
enjoy their spiritual nature here, is what best prepares them for the
future life. Dewey, like Franklin, who trained the lightning of the
sky to respect the safety, and finally to run the errands of men on
earth, brought religion from its remote home and domesticated it in
the immediate present. He first successfully taught its application
to the business of the market and the street, to the offices of home
and the pleasures of society. We are so familiar with this method, now
prevalent in the best pulpits of all Christian bodies, that we forget
the originality and boldness of the hand that first turned the current
of religion into the ordinary channel of life, and upon the working
wheels of daily business. The glory of the achievement is lost in the
magnificence of its success. Practical preaching, when it means, as it
often does, a mere prosaic recommendation of ordinary duties, a sort of
Poor Richard's prudential [361] maxims, is a shallow and nearly useless
thing. It is a kind of social and moral agriculture with the plough
and the spade, but with little regard to the enrichment of the soil,
or drainage from the depths or irrigation from the heights. The true,
practical preaching is that which brings the celestial truths of our
nature and our destiny, the powers of the world to come and the terrors
and promises of our relationship to the Divine Being, to bear upon our
present duties, to animate and elevate our daily life, to sanctify the
secular, to redeem the common from its loss of wonder and praise, to
make the familiar give up its superficial tameness, to awaken the sense
of awe in those who have lost or never acquired the proper feeling of
the spiritual mystery that envelops our ordinary life. This was Dewey's
peculiar skill. Poets had already done it for poets, and in a sense
neither strictly religious nor expected to be made practical. But for
preachers to carry `the vision and faculty divine' of the poet into
the pulpit, and with the authority of messengers of God, demand of men
in their business and domestic service, their mechanical labors, their
necessary tasks, to see God's spirit and feel God's laws everywhere
touching, inspiring, and elevating their ordinary life and lot, was
something new and glorious. Thus Dewey revitalized the doctrine of
Retribution by bringing it from the realms a futurity down to the
immediate bosoms of men; and nothing more solemn, affecting, and
true is to be found in all literature than his famous two sermons on
Retribution, in the first volume of his published works. Spirituality,
in the same manner, he called away from its ghostly churchyard haunts,
and made it a cheerful angel of God's presence in the house and the
shop, where the sense and feeling of God's holiness [362] and love
make every duty an act of worship, and every commonest experience
an opportunity of divine service. Under the thoughtful, tender
yet searching, rational but profoundly spiritual preaching of Dr.
Dewey,--where men's souls found an holiest and powerful interpreter,
and nature, business, pleasure, domestic ties, received a fresh
consecration,-who can wonder that thousands of men and women, hitherto
dissatisfied, hungry, but with no appetite for the bread' called of
life,' furnished at the ordinary churches, were, for the first time,
made to realize the beauty of holiness and the power of the gospel of
salvation?
"The persuasiveness of Dewey was another of his greatest
characteristics. His yearning to convince, his longing to impart his
own convictions, gave a candor and patient and sweet reasonableness to
his preaching, which has, I think, never been equalled in any preacher
of his measure of intellect, height of imagination, and reverence of
soul. For he could never lower his ideals to please or propitiate.
He was working for no immediate and transitory effects. He could use
no arts that entangled, dazzled, or frightened; nothing but truth,
and truth cautiously discriminated. His sermons were born of the most
painful labors of his spirit; they were careful and finished works,
written and rewritten, revised, corrected, improved, almost as if they
had been poems addressed to the deliberate judgment of posterity.
They possess that claim upon coming generations, and will, one day,
rediscovered by a deeper and better spiritual taste, take their place
among the noblest and most exquisite of the intellectual and spiritual
products of this century. There are thousands of the best minds in
this country that owe whatever interest they have in religion [363] to
Orville Dewey. The majesty of his manner, the dramatic power of his
action, the poetic beauty of his illustrations, the logical clearness
and fairness of his reasoning, the depth and grasp of his hold on all
the facts, human and divine, material and spiritual, that belonged to
the theme he treated, gave him a surpassing power and splendor, and an
equal persuasiveness as a preacher. But what is most rare, his sermons,
though they gained much by delivery, lose little in reading, for those
who never heard them. They are admirably adapted to the pulpit, none
more so; but just as wonderfully suited to the library and to solitary
perusal. I am not extravagant or alone in this opinion. I know that so
competent a critic as James Martineau holds them in equal admiration.
"I shall make no excuse for dwelling so long upon Orville Dewey's
genius as a preacher. No plainer duty exists than to commend his
example to the study and imitation of our own preachers; and no
exaltation that the Church of the Messiah will ever attain can in any
probability equal that which will always be given to it as the seat
of Dr. Dewey's thirteen years' ministry in the city of New York. Of
the tenderness, modesty, truthfulness, devotion, and spotless purity
of his life and character, it is too soon to utter all that my heart
and knowledge prompt me to say. But, when expression shall finally
be allowed to the testimony which cannot very long be denied free
utterance, it will fully appear that only a man whose soul was haunted
by God's spirit from early youth to extreme old age could have produced
the works that stand in his name. The man is greater than his works."
[364]In the August following my father's death, an appropriate service
was held in his memory at the old Congregational Church in his native
village. It was the church of his childhood, from whose galleries he
had looked down with childish pity upon the sad-browed communicants;
[see p. 16] it was the church to which he had joined himself in the
religious fervor of his youth; from it he had been thrust out as a
heretic, and for years was not permitted to speak within its walls,
the first time being in 1876, when the town celebrated the hundredth
anniversary of the Resolution that had marked its Revolutionary ardor,
and called upon him, as one of its most distinguished citizens, to
preach upon the occasion; and now the old church opened wide its doors
in affectionate respect to his memory, and his mourning townspeople met
to honor the man they had learned to love, if not to follow.
It was a lovely summer day, full of calm and sunny sweetness. The
earlier harvests had been gathered in, and the beautiful valley lay in
perfect rest,-"Like a full heart, having prayed."
Taghkonic brooded above it in gentle majesty, and the scarce seen river
wound its quiet course among the meadows. No touch of drought or decay
had yet passed upon the luxuriant foliage; but the autumnal flowers
were already glowing [365] in the fields and on the waysides, and,
mingled with ferns and ripened grain, were heaped in rich profusion by
the loving hands of young girls to adorn the church. It was Sunday,
and people and friends came from far and near, till the building was
filled; and in the pervading atmosphere of tender respect and sympathy,
the warm-hearted words spoken from the pulpit seemed like the utterance
of the common feeling. The choir sang, with much expression, one of my
father's favorite hymns,-"When, as returns this solemn day;" and the
prayer, from Dr. Eddy, the pastor of the church, was a true uplifting
of hearts to the Father of all. The fervent and touching discourse
which followed, by Rev. Robert Collyer, minister of my father's old
parish, the Church of the Messiah, in New York, recalled the early
days of Dr. Dewey's life, and the influences from home and from nature
that had borne upon his character, and described the man and his work
in terms of warm and not indiscriminate eulogy. The speaker's brow
lightened, and his cheek glowed with the strength of his own feeling,
and among his listeners there was an answering thrill of gratitude and
of aspiration.
Dr. Powers, an Episcopal clergyman, then read a short and graceful
original poem, and some cordial and earnest words were said by
the two Orthodox ministers present. Another hymn was sung by the
whole congregation; and thus fitly closed the simple and reverent
service, typical throughout of the kindly human brotherhood which,
notwithstanding inevitable differences of opinion, binds together
hearts that throb with one common need, that rest upon one Eternal Love
and Wisdom.
So would my father have wished it. So may it be more and more!