Among Englishmen, I owe the most to James Martineau, at the time of my
ordination (1847), a Unitarian clergyman in Liverpool. His lectures in
the Unitarian controversy (1839) on "Christianity without Priest and
without Ritual," on "The Christian View of Moral Evil," on "The Bible:
What It Is and What It is Not"; his articles on "Distinctive Types of
Christianity," on "Creeds and Heresies of Early Christianity," on "The
Ethics of Christendom," on "The Creed of Christendom," on "St. Paul and
His Modern Students," made a profound impression on my mind. One passage
in particular, at the close of the essay on "The Ethics of Christendom,"
still lingers in my memory:
The old antagonism between the world that now is and any other
that has been or is to come, has been modified, or has entirely
ceased.... _Here_ is the spot, _now_ is the time for the most
devoted service of God. No strains of heaven will wake man into
prayer, if the common music of humanity stirs him not. The
saintly company of spirits will throng around him in vain if he
finds no angels of duty and affection in his children, neighbors,
and friends. If no heavenly voices wander around him in the
present, the future will be but the dumb change of the shadow on
the dial. In short, higher stages of existence are not the refuge
of this, but the complement to it; and it is the proper wisdom of
the affections not to escape the one in order to seek the other,
but to flow forth in purifying copiousness on both.
Martineau's intellectual fidelity, accurate learning, earnestness of
feeling, were exceedingly fascinating.
In this country Ralph Waldo Emerson was the great teacher. He gave an
atmosphere rather than a dogma. He was air and light. He is best
described, not as a philosopher, a man of letters, a poet, but as a
seer. His gift was that of insight. This he tried to render
comprehensive, searching, intelligent, accurate, by reading, study,
meditation, the acquaintance of distinguished men; but he was never
beguiled into thinking that learning, eloquence, wit, constituted his
peculiarity. He had a penetrating, eager, questioning look. His head was
thrust out as if in quest of knowledge. His gaze was steady and intense.
His speech was laconic and to the purpose. His direct manner suggested a
wish for closer acquaintance with the mind. His very courtesy, which was
invariable and exquisite in its way, had an air of inquiry about it.
There was no varnish, no studied grace of motion or demeanor, no
manifest desire to please, but a kind of wistfulness as of one who took
you at your best and wanted to draw it out. He accosted the soul, and
with the winning persuasiveness which befits friendliness on human
terms. There was a certain shyness which indicated the modesty which is
born of the spirit.
But a commanding doer he certainly was not; that is, he was no man of
expedients, of practical resources, of merely executive will. He
appreciated this kind of ability, as his lecture on Napoleon shows, but
he possessed little of it, his Yankee ingenuity being more confined in
its range. The moral courage belonged to him, the earnestness, the
faith, but his ethereal qualities lacked driving force. His principles
made him interested in every movement of reform, for he had a boundless
hope which led him sometimes into extravagant anticipations of truth and
benefit. Every sign of life, intellectual, moral, spiritual, caught his
eye, and so long as it promised new developments of power his eager
sympathy went with it, but when the creative period ceased he turned
away. He early enlisted in the anti-slavery cause, not because he had
entire confidence in the negro, or specially liked the abolitionists,
but because he demanded the utmost liberty for all men in order that
substantial advantages might be widely shared; but he was not prominent
among the workers of that reform. His name stood foremost in the list of
those who claimed the emancipation of woman from social or political
disability, not that he was a worker in the woman's-rights phalanx, not
that he looked for any immediate benefit from that agitation, or felt
any particular interest in the leaders or in the success of that
individual crusade, but that he was in favor of the largest opportunity
for all human beings, and wished every particle of power to be used.
From the first he welcomed the Free Religious Association as giving
promise of original light, greater breadth, fresh vigor, new revelations
of knowledge in that most ideal, but most deplorably limited, of all
spheres; but when in his view that promise was unfulfilled, though his
name still stood with those of its vice-presidents, he ceased to take
any part in its proceedings or to feel any personal concern in its
affairs. There was something theoretical, speculative, in his attitude
as a reformer. His philosophy pledged him to the utmost individualism,
and this called for the utmost liberty, that each might receive all he
could of the divine fulness and be as much as his nature required. Hence
his own limited expectation; hence his enthusiasm in behalf of
individuals like Walt Whitman, John Brown, Henry Thoreau; hence the
light that came into his eyes when he sat in some reform convention
where high thoughts were spoken. His word was given, and it was always
inspiring, emancipating, uplifting, heard in the valleys from the
dizziest heights of vision; but force was not his to give. Such words
were more than "half battles," to be sure, so invigorating were they to
all the champions of good causes, but they were _words_ still, and
seemed to proceed from some upper region of impersonal mind. They
expressed convictions, feelings, desires, but there was lack of blood in
them. They seemed made of air; there was soul behind them, but not as
much body as many wished. In a word, all the ideal elements were
present. He was a man who believed, felt, hoped, had vast resources of
faith, but was a thinker more than an actor. Thinking is indeed doing,
yet not in the same sphere of achievement.
Emerson recognized the limitations of genius. "Life is a scale of
degrees," he says in the lecture on the "Uses of Great Men."
Between rank and rank of our great men are wide intervals. Mankind
have in all ages attached themselves to a few persons who, either
by the quality of that idea they embodied, or by the largeness of
their reception, were entitled to the position of leaders and
lawgivers.... With each new mind a new secret of nature transpires;
nor can the Bible be closed until the last great man is born.... We
cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a
bore at last.... We balance one man with his opposite, and the
health of the state depends on the see-saw.
Emerson looks forward to the time when all souls shall lie open to the
heavenly influx, and he regards greatness as an earnest of that
possibility. What disappointments he must have felt as he was forced to
turn away from people who should have been saints and heroes, but were
none! What bitter moments he must have known when he stretched out his
arms to welcome a goddess and embraced only a cloud! But his
expectations continued eager; no feature betrayed evidence that these
practical refutations of his theory had effect on his heart.
Whether Emerson's constant belief in the Over-soul, his stubborn theism,
his persuasion of an immanent God, was an advantage or a disadvantage to
his philosophical view of the universe may be doubted. On the one hand,
we cannot question the fact that he owed to it his enthusiastic faith in
the substantial unity of creation, his optimism, his assurance of future
progress, his confidence in man, his moral earnestness, his elevation of
soul, his buoyancy of spirit, his forwardness in all endeavors after
reform. On the other hand, it can hardly be denied that it led him to
take some things for granted, diverted his mind from the unprejudiced
observation of phenomena, prevented his rendering full justice to the
scientific method, was the cause of wide aberrations in his estimates of
human character, and of a curious onesidedness in his judgments on human
condition.
Emerson was always profoundly religious, at heart a supernaturalist. The
blood of centuries of pious ancestors was in his veins. His soul was
uppermost, not his intellect nor his heart. He was a closet man, a
minister at the altar. True, he rejected every form of the religious
sentiment, and moved with entire freedom among dogmas however expressed
in word or in rite. Every attempt at giving voice to spiritual emotion
was disagreeable to him.
I like a church; I like a cowl;
I like a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles;
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowled churchman be.
Theology had fallen from him like a shroud. He would not venture any
definition of the spiritual laws. Doctrine had become faith; prayer was
changed into aspiration; the speechless utterance was the only one he
cordially listened to. But faith he held fast; aspiration he cherished;
the inarticulate language of the eternal was ever in his ears.
Ever and anon would come a burst of conviction. "Oh, my brothers, God
exists!" he cries in an ecstasy of emotion. Some years ago Emerson
seemed fascinated by the inductive method, so that some of his admirers
thought he would become a convert to physical science. But the bent of
his nature asserted itself, and he pursued the deductive system as
before. His passion for "First Truths," as they were called, was
irresistible. He could not abandon the philosophy of intuition, and all
his studies--comprehensive, profound, and original as they were,--his
insatiable thirst for knowledge, his inordinate appetite for details of
fact, incidents, anecdotes, gleanings from literature of every kind,
were subservient to this.
Emerson's serenity is often spoken of as evidence of the power of his
religious faith. It may allow of this construction, but it may be
accounted for on other and different grounds which lie nearer at hand
and proceed immediately from more obvious sources. How far may a long
ancestral experience in devout meditations, practices, longings, worked
into the system and producing a sedate, calm, interior temperament, go
in explaining that almost imperturbable tranquillity? The piety of his
forefathers was so genuine that it drove him from the church of his
adoption, and rendered another calling sacred. Their descendant
exhibited the same saintliness which they possessed but in a different
fashion. And he was probably saintlier than they were, because he was
their child. His brothers had the same characteristic of equanimity by
virtue of the same parentage. His brother William, whom I knew
intimately in New York, showed in his daily life a similar dignity, and
tradition reports the same of Charles. It was the perfect fruitage of
centuries of heavenly-minded men, not the peculiarity of an individual
soul.
This predisposition to inwardness was favored by the long seclusion of
Concord, which kept Emerson aloof from the world and prevented the
friction which is so damaging to serenity. He saw those only who
respected, loved, honored, and revered him. He came into collision with
none. Men of thought, unambitious men, students, farmers, were his
fellow-townsmen. Several hours in each day he was alone with his books
or his mind. When he visited the city it was for an intellectual or
social purpose, as one who had dropped from a star and was soon to
vanish. His contact was with men of letters, clergymen, publishers,
friends, gentlemen interested in mental pursuits who had left their
business in order to disport themselves in the fields of thought. These
added to his stores of wisdom, and sent him home replenished rather than
drained. The gains of his day were not dissipated either by business
occupation or pleasure.
Then, whether from disposition or philosophy we cannot tell, this man
avoided everything dark, evil, unwholesome, unpleasant. Sickness of all
kinds, complaint, depression, melancholy, was an abomination to him. He
turned away from ugly sights and sounds, thus evading conflict. He never
argued, never discussed, but said his word as well as he could, and
encouraged others to say theirs, in this way hoping to get at the truth.
By this course he escaped the usual provocations to ill-temper, and was
forced upon an undisturbed equipoise of mind. Nothing helps serenity so
much as avoidance of contest, and when one can thoroughly convince
himself that there is no rooted evil in the world to be fought against,
an even condition of soul is not hard to maintain; optimism is
proverbially cheerful, but an optimism that is grounded in principle
must be unconquerable by any force that circumstances can bring against
it.
It must be remembered that Emerson was not a man of warm temperament,
not tropical in color or in heat; more like the morning, cool and
breezy, than like the sultry noon-day, or the glowing evening; more like
the dewy spring, than the effulgent summer or the fruit-bearing autumn;
not a child of the sun, rather suggesting the still, white, imaginative
moonlight. There was an air of remoteness about him. His remark to the
inn-keeper,--"heat me red-hot," tells the story. Simple habits kept his
frame wiry, and a New England nurture saved his mind from luxuriant
uncleanness. By nature he was passionless. The beautiful "Threnody" on
the death of his boy, reveals the sorrow of a soaring mind rather than
the grief of a crushed heart. To command one's self enough for such an
effort evinces a rare power of rising above mortal conditions. Such a
constitution finds solitude congenial and is calm by force of
inclination. Friendship seems an emotion better suited than love to that
ethereal soul, which was always radiant but seldom burning, benignant,
seldom craving, always gracious in imparting, seldom hungry for
receiving. One might walk in his illumination, but one could hardly bask
in his heat, or lie on his bosom, or nestle near his heart. They that
knew him at home may speak more warmly of him, but thus he appeared to
people outside; thus he appeared to many who had admired him as I did
and tried to get close to him.
The love of wild, untrimmed nature, the want of interest in cultivated
gardens, was part of his theory of the universe as the expression of
God; the richer, the less it was interfered with. He would approach as
near to the Creator as possible, listening for the divine voice, which
was most clearly heard in the wilderness. To the same source must be
ascribed his partiality for wild, untrained men,--foresters, hunters,
pioneers, trappers, back-woodsmen. He sought everywhere after
originality, freshness, power, in individuals and in groups. He hailed a
genius, however rough. Unconventionality excited his enthusiasm to such
a degree that he could scarcely contain himself, but said the most
extravagant things in the ecstasy of his hope. Men of polished outside
he did not care for; mechanical men, however successful, politicians,
however popular and adroit, were his aversion. Accomplishments, however
great, scholarship however finished, he did not respect. He wanted the
rough, uncut gem. Genius of whatever description, in whatever class,
whatever its order or grade, was his joy. In him the love of truth
predominated. He submitted to the inconvenience of imperfect opinion,
but respected the highest law of his being. He believed in the eternal
laws of mind, in the self-existence of right, in purity, veracity,
goodness. He was one of the most honest of men, one of the cleanest, and
he did his utmost to bring his life into correspondence with his best
thought. That all created things must be imperfect was part of his
creed; that this imperfection ran through human character he was as much
convinced as any man; and his efforts were unceasing to turn men's eyes
towards the beauty "ancient but ever new," which he in his moments of
insight beheld. No one lives up to his most exalted faith. No one ever
endeavored to do so more sincerely and humbly than Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In my early ministry, the discourses of Dr. Orville Dewey on "Human
Nature," "Human Life," "The Nature of Religion," seemed all-sufficing. I
read them over and over again with increasing admiration, and his
solutions of spiritual problems were accepted as final.
Miss Mary Dewey, in the admirable memoir of her father, lays great
stress on his affectionate qualities. These cannot be too emphatically
asserted; yet they probably had more scope than even she suspected.
Indeed, unless I am much mistaken, they formed the basis of his
character. He was a most deep-feeling man. He loved his friends in and
out of the profession, with a loyal, hearty, obliging, warm, and even
tender emotion, expressing itself in word and deed. It was overflowing,
not in any sentimental manner, but in a manly, sincere way. He was a man
of infinite good-will, of a quite boundless kindness. His voice, his
expression of face, his smile, the grasp of his hand,--all gave sign of
it. He felt things keenly; his sensibilities were most acute; even his
thoughts were suffused with emotion. He could not discuss speculative
themes as if they were cold or dry. Nothing was arid to his mind. In
prayer it was not unusual for his audience to discern tears rolling down
his cheeks. One day, in his study, on speaking about the intellectual
implications of the "Philosophie Positive," he dropped his head and
seemed for a moment lost in reverie largely made up of devotion. In him,
heart was uppermost; intellect, conscience, were of subordinate value
when taken alone; in fact, they were incomplete by themselves, and
wanted their proper substance. He said once that his skin was so
delicate that the least soil on his hands was felt all through his
system and prevented him from working. This excessive sensibility, which
could not be understood by the world at large, was at the bottom of his
likes and dislikes, of his personal fears and hopes. Excitement drained
off his strength. He exhausted himself physically, and fell into
ill-health by exertions that would not have taxed an ordinary
constitution. It cost him a great deal to write sermons, to visit the
sick or sorrowing, to conduct public services. At the same time, he was
disqualified, by a certain want of steel in his blood, for any but the
clerical profession, where qualities like his are of inestimable value,
and of the rarest kind. He was a minister from the beginning, always
profoundly interested in questions of the interior life, and though he
early left the orthodox communion and became a preacher of Unitarian
Christianity, making it his work to apply religious ideas to all the
concerns of the natural world and the secular life, he retained all the
fervor of spirit that charaterized the most devout believer. A vein of
passionate feeling ran through all his discourses, and while his themes
were taken from daily existence, his thoughts were fixed on eternity. He
was absorbed in the destiny of the human soul, of the _individual_ soul,
bringing all discussions to that point, and trying to make lasting
impressions on the spiritual natures of men and women.
When I first knew him he had the reputation of being a self-indulgent
man. This was a great mistake. His way of life was exceedingly simple,
and his habits were almost abstemious. In fact, neither his physical nor
his mental constitution allowed of any indulgence in eating or drinking.
Still the impression was a natural one, for a certain amount of ease,
exemption from care, gayety, was necessary to him. The society of
elegant, accomplished people was indispensable to his recreation and
rest. His motive for seeking such was not the love of luxury so much as
a demand for recreation and a craving for repose. He was not, in any
sense, an earthy man or one who loved sensual delights. On the contrary,
he was always mindful of his calling, always intent on high subjects,
always ready to lead intercourse upwards, always, to the extent of his
power, interested in the moral aspect of current discussions;
over-anxious, if anything, to approach speculative themes. He possessed
an eager, unresting, questioning mind. He was always thinking, and on
great subjects of theology or philosophy, and he put into them an amount
of feeling that is extraordinary with intellectual men.
That he should have been so sensitive as he was to the words and
suspicions of anti-slavery men who charged him with being an advocate of
a fugitive-slave law, an apologist for slavery, a ready tool of the
inhuman, reactionary party of the country, is not surprising. His dread
of pain, his hatred of falsehood, his horror of injustice, his love of
fair play, will sufficiently account for this; while the impossibility
of explaining himself kept the wound open. That for thirty years the
sore should have bled, shows the delicacy of his temperament and the
shrinking nature of his will. To speak of him as a friend of slavery is
absurd. No one can read his sermon on "The Slavery Question," preached
shortly after the annexation of Texas and at a moment of great
excitement at the North in regard to the advances of the slave-power,
and not perceive that he was deeply moved.
"_Are these people_ MEN?" he said; "that is the question. If they
are _men_, it will not do to make them instruments for mere
convenience,--for the mere tillage of the soil;--if they are _men_, it
is not enough to say that they have a sort of animal freedom from care,
and joyance of spirits. If they are _men_, they are to be cultivated;
their faculties are to be regarded as precious; they are to be
improved.... If he is a _man_, then he is not only improvable and ought
to be improved, but he _will improve_ in spite of all we can do." And a
great deal more to the same effect. He indignantly protested against
treating "an intelligent creature, a fellow-being, a brother-man, a
being capable of indefinite expansion and immortal progress," as one
would treat a tree, a flower, an ox, or a horse. "Grant that the African
of the present generation cannot be raised to our stature; yet if in the
course of ages he may be, and if it is our policy systematically to
arrest or to retard his growth, does the case materially differ from
what I have supposed?" Namely that of a child. Dr. Dewey visited
slave-States and talked with slave-holders in order to make himself
fully acquainted with the condition of opinion and of feeling about the
case, and he took occasion everywhere to argue the Northern side. This
ought to be enough in the way of vindication of his personal sentiments.
At the same time, he was a Unionist of the Webster school. His
attachment to the Union was intense. Disunion in his judgment meant
ceaseless discord, the end of republican institutions, the arrest of
civilization, the indefinite postponement of progress, the hopelessness
of education and uplifting for the slave, the withdrawal of Northern
influence, the final overthrow of government by moral powers. A long
reign of anarchy, in the course of which the lovers of the race must see
their visions of good disappear, would supervene, and this he could not
contemplate with equanimity.
Then he was an old-fashioned enemy of war, especially of civil war. He
was a sincere lover of peace, and a believer in the arts of peace, in
industry, education, the diffusion of intelligence, the weaving of the
ties of fraternity; and though he acknowledged the heroic mission of
strife, he recoiled instinctively from it. War, in his estimation, was
an inevitable necessity in the order of the world, but it was an awful
element in the "world problem"; "a fearful scourge," a condition to be
outgrown along with vice, passion, injustice, selfishness, ambition, a
sign that is destined to disappear as intelligence and Christianity come
in. It must be submitted to as an ordination of Providence, but it
should never be precipitated by men, least of all should it be brought
on hastily, by unreasonableness, malignity, or hate. The evils of war
were precisely such as appealed most directly to his imagination; they
were so personal, they were so domestic, they were so pitiable, they
were so full of tears. He shrank from violence, from rage, from party
ambition, from curses and cries. He loved his countrymen, and, so long
as any reason remained, he could not bear to think of fighting. So long
as any oil was left in the can, the troubled waters were not to be
abandoned by the peace-makers. It was much for him to have patience with
those who used angry words, even in a cause of righteousness. He, for
his part, could not scold or overstate, or do anything in a harsh
temper.
Dr. Dewey believed in colonization; not necessarily in Africa, but in a
separation between the white and black races, in the civilization of the
negro. In the tenth lecture of the course on "The Problem of Human
Destiny" (1864), he takes occasion to welcome "the great hope" that thus
was opened "for purging our American soil from the stain of slavery.
Many of us have long been asking how this is to be done. Look at Africa,
surrounded by a wall of darkness, and filled with cruelty and blood,
with no civilizing influence in herself, as the story of ages has
proved; what now do we see? Britain sends to her borders the
man-stealer, to tear her children from her bosom and transport them to
the American colonies. It was a deed of unmingled atrocity, compared
with which capture in war was generous and honorable; the African King
of Dahomey grows white by the side of the Saxon slave-trader. But what
follows? The African people in this country improve, and are now far
advanced beyond their kindred at home. And now they begin to return;
they are building a state on their native borders which promises to stop
the slave trade with Africa and to spread light and civilization through
her dark solitudes." At the close of his discourse on the slavery
question, he said:
If I were to propose a plan to meet the duties and perils of this
tremendous emergency that presses upon us, I would engage the whole
power of this nation, the willing co-operation of the North and the
South, if it were possible, to prepare this people for freedom; and
then I would give them a country beyond the mountains,--say the
Californias,--where they might be a nation by themselves. Ah! if
the millions upon millions spent upon a Mexican war could be
devoted to this purpose,--if all the energies of this country could
be employed for such an end,--what a noble spectacle were it for
all the world to behold, of help and redemption to an enslaved
people! What a purifying and ennobling ministration for ourselves!
The intimacy with Dr. Charming re-inforced the conclusions which were
native to Dr. Dewey's temperament. The moderate view, the dread of
overstatement, the fear of fanaticism, the faith in reason, the love of
tranquillity, the desire after truth, were rooted in his mind. His
constitutional conservatism was confirmed. Then he was a Unitarian, and
therefore rational in his methods, inclined to judge by arguments, to
sift opinions by the understanding. The abolitionists were, for the most
part, either Calvinists or transcendentalists, people who followed an
inward voice, who placed interior conviction before ratiocination, and
encouraged moral sentiment to take the lead in action, blowing coals
into a flame, and not content unless they saw a blaze. The Unitarians,
as a class, were not ardent disciples of any moral cause, and took pride
in being reasoners, believers in education, and in general social
influence, in the progress of knowledge, and the uplifting of humanity
by means of ideas. The habit of discountenancing passion may have been
fostered in a school like this. Perhaps if young Dewey had continued in
his old belief he would have been a more vehement reformer than he was.
His natural glow was softened down into a mild effulgence, communicating
warmth to his convictions, but not producing a burning zeal for any
substance of doctrine.
His power of emotion made him a powerful preacher but prevented his
being a great philosopher. Dr. Bellows, who was his close friend for
many years, described him as a man of "massive intellectual power," and
then went on to impute to him the gifts that belong to the pulpit
orator: "poetic imagination," a "rare dramatic faculty of
representation." Perhaps by "massive" Dr. Bellows meant the power to
throw thoughts in a mass, with cumulative effect. This power Dr. Dewey
certainly possessed in an extraordinary degree. But of philosophical
talent he had little. Indeed, he seemed to be conscious of this himself.
At the end of his first lecture before the Lowell Institute he said:
I am not sorry that the place and occasion require me to make this
a popular theme. I am not to speak for philosophers, but for the
people. I wish to meet the questions which arise in all minds that
have awaked to any degree of reflection upon their nature and
being, and upon the collective being of their race. I have hoped
that I should escape the charge of presumption by the humbleness of
my attempt--the attempt, that is to say, to popularize a theme
which has hitherto been the domain of scholars.
The lecture assumes the existence of a Personal God, the reality of a
conscious soul, the freedom of the human will, the fact of a moral
purpose in creation, the perfectibility of man, the idea of progress,
the evidence of design in the universe attesting a divine intelligence.
The treatment nowhere shows metaphysical acumen or speculative insight.
On every page is brilliancy, eloquence, skilful manipulation of
arguments, fervent appeal to conscience. Nowhere is subtilty or depth of
intuition. Take for example the discourse on "The Problem of Evil," the
most intellectually exacting of all subjects. It ends thus after a
series of pictures:
Give me freedom, give me knowledge, give me breadth of experience;
I would have it all. No memory is so hallowed, no memory is so
dear, as that of temptation nobly withstood, or of suffering nobly
endured. What is it that we gather and garner up from the solemn
story of the world, like its struggles, its sorrows, its
martyrdoms? Come to the great battle, thou wrestling, glorious,
marred nature! strong nature! weak nature! Come to the great
battle, and in this mortal strife strike for immortal victory! The
highest Son of God, the best beloved of Heaven that ever stood upon
earth, was "made perfect through suffering." And sweeter shall be
the cup of immortal joy, for that it once was dashed with bitter
drops of pain and sorrow; and brighter shall roll the everlasting
ages, for the dark shadows that clouded the birth-time of our
being.
This is not argument, but preaching--- very fine, stimulating, powerful
preaching, but preaching nevertheless; quite different from James
Martineau's treatment of the same theme, in the course of the Liverpool
lectures (delivered in 1839). Mr. Martineau, too, addressed a popular
assembly, and closed his discourse in a strain of exhortation. Still,
the grave tone of the previous discussion sobered the rhetoric, and the
background of the ancient debate made the moral lessons solemn.
Philosophy yielded to the necessities of ethics, much as the "Kritik der
Reinen Vernunft" gave place to the "Kritik der Practischen Vernunft" of
Kant--the preacher and the reasoner standing indeed on different ground,
but the moral instruction being tempered by the philosophical.
Orville Dewey was a great preacher, perhaps the greatest that the
Unitarian communion has produced; greater as a preacher than Dr.
Channing, because more various and more sympathetic, nearer to the
popular heart, less inspired by grand ideas, and for that reason more
moving. He was imbued with Channing's fundamental thought--the "Dignity
of Human Nature,"--and illustrated it with a wealth of imagination,
enforced it by an urgency of appeal, quickened it by an affluence of
dramatic representation all his own. His function was to apply this
doctrine to every incident of life, to politics, business, art,
literature, society, amusement, and he did this with a boldness, a
freedom, a frankness unusual at any time, but without example when he
was in the ministry. I shall never forget, in one of his sermons, an
allusion to a symphony of Beethoven which gave me a new conception of
the essential humanity of the pulpit's office, of the close association
that there was between religion and art. His conversational style,
impassioned but not stilted and never turgid, was exceedingly
impressive, while his constant employment of the forms of reasoning
added weight to his sentences. The discourse was plain, and yet from its
copiousness it was ornate; and the affectionate tone assumed an air of
grave remonstrance which was deepened in effect by the appearance of
formal logic. The hearer seemed to be admitted to the secrets of a
living, earnest mind, and to be listening to something more than the
usual enunciations of ethical principle. At the same time his own will
was consulted, he was taken into partnership with the orator and
introduced to the processes of conviction. His state of feeling was
considered, his objections were met, his scruples answered, his
arguments confronted. He was, in short, treated like a rational being,
to be reasoned with, not to be looked down upon.
Dr. Dewey was always a friend of liberal thought. There are no more
significant pages in his daughter's memoir of him than those which
contain his correspondence with Mr. Chadwick, one of the most radical of
Unitarian divines. He was himself a student of divinity at Andover,
early converted to Unitarianism, became an assistant and warm friend of
Dr. Channing, but instead of remaining stationary in dogmatic faith,
took a rational view of all religious questions, favored the largest
liberality, and welcomed every effort to adapt spiritual ideas to actual
knowledge. He had no dogmatic prepossessions, and no professional fears.
What he asked for was sincerity coupled with earnestness. This being
given, conclusions, within certain limits, of course, were of little
moment. Theodore Parker used to sadden and irritate him, but less on
account of his opinions than on account of his pugnacious manner in
expressing them. Parker rather despised him for what he regarded as his
time-serving disposition, and could not understand his mental delicacy;
but men who thought as Parker did were even then on the best terms with
Dr. Dewey, whose mellowness, on the whole, increased instead of
diminishing with age, and was greatest in his declining years.
He was a man fond of personalities; even in his addresses on the
greatest themes, he would if possible narrow the subject down to the
measure of individual application. Thus when lecturing on "The Problem
of Evil," after submitting various considerations, he adds:
Broad and vast and immense as that problem may appear, it is after
all, in actual experience, purely individual.... The truth is,
nobody has experienced more of it than you or I have, or might
have, experienced. With regard to all the intrinsic difficulties of
the case, it is as if one life had been lived in the world; and
since no man has lived another's life, or any life but his own,
there _has been_ to actual individual consciousness _but one life_
of thirty, seventy, or a hundred years lived on earth. The problem
really comes within that compass.... If I can solve the problem of
existence for myself, I have solved it for everybody; I have solved
it for the human race.... Do you and I find anything in this our
life that makes us prize it, anything that makes us feel that we
had rather have it than have it not? Doubtless we do and other men
do; all men do.
This passage illustrates well the tendency to personal reference that
distinguished the man. In a discourse on war delivered before the Peace
Society he resolves its miseries into those of the individual, as if
mass--affecting, as it does, nations, civilizations, humanity
itself--counted for nothing. This tendency explains his fondness for his
friends, his strength of sympathy, his tenacity of attachment, his love
for people. It does not betoken a broad, deep, philosophic mind, but it
does betoken a warm, clinging, affectionate nature.
It made him too a charming feature in society, a delightful talker, an
easy, graceful, delectable companion, an interested adviser and
counsellor, a beloved person in his family, an excellent townsman.
We should be grateful for this, that one has lived to irradiate a
somewhat sad profession, to warm the bleak spaces of mortal existence,
to throw a gleam of gladness upon the sunless problems of human destiny.
It is a great deal to be assured that a living heart has walked with us,
and that a living voice has proclaimed the heart-side of man's lot.