1885-1886

As time kept whispering its hastening call into my ear I grew more and more vigorous in my outlook. I was given strength to hurry faster myself, with a certain energy to climb higher up, where the view was wider, bigger, clearer. As I moved upward I had but one fear, and that was of looking backward. A minister, entrusted with the charge of souls, cannot afford to retrace his steps. He must go on, and up, to the top of his abilities, of his spiritual purposes.

In the midst of a glorious summer, I refused to see the long shadows of departing day; in the midst of a snow deep winter, I declined to slip and slide as I went on. So it happened that a great many gathered about me in the tabernacle, because they felt that I was passing on, and they wanted to see how fast I could go. I aimed always for a higher place and the way to get up to it, and I took them along with me, always a little further, week by week.

The pessimists came to me and said that the world would soon have a surplus of educated men, that the colleges were turning out many nerveless and useless youngsters, that education seemed to be one of the follies of 1885. The fact was we were getting to be far superior to what we had been. The speeches at the commencement classes were much better than those we had made in our boyhood. We had dropped the old harangues about Greece and Rome. We were talking about the present. The sylphs and naiads and dryads had already gone out of business. College education had been revolutionised. Students were not stuffed to the Adam’s apple with Latin and Greek. The graduates were improved in physique. A great advance was reached when male and female students were placed in the same institutions, side by side. God put the two sexes together in Eden, He put them beside each other in the family. Why not in the college?

There were those who seemed to regard woman as a Divine afterthought. Judging by the fashion plates of olden times, in other centuries, the grand-daughters were far superior to the grand-mothers, and the fuss they used to make a hundred years ago over a very good woman showed me that the feminine excellence, so rare then, was more common than it used to be. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a woman was considered well educated if she could do a sum in rule of three. Look at the books in all departments that are under the arms of the school miss now. I believe in equal education for men and women to fulfil the destiny of this land.

For all women who were then entering the battle of life, I saw that the time was coming when they would not only get as much salary as men, but for certain employments they would receive higher wages. It would not come to them through a spirit of gallantry, but through the woman’s finer natural taste, greater grace of manner, and keener perceptions. For these virtues she would be worth ten per cent. more to her employer than a man. But she would get it by earning it, not by asking for it.

In the summer of 1885 I made another trip to Europe. The day I reached Charing Cross station in London the exposures of vice in the Pall Mall Gazette were just issued. The paper had not been out half an hour. Mr. Stead, the editor, was later put on trial for startling Europe and America in his crusade against crime. There were the same conditions in America, in Upper Broadway, and other big thoroughfares in New York, by night, as there were in London. I believe the greatest safety against vice is newspaper chastisement of dishonour and crime. I urged that some paper in America should attack the social evil, as the Pall Mall Gazette had done. A hundred thousand people, with banners and music, gathered in Hyde Park in London, to express their approval of the reformation started by Mr. Stead, and there were a million people in America who would have backed up the same moral heroism. If my voice were loud enough to be heard from Penobscot to the Rio Grande, I would cry out “Flirtation is damnation.” The vast majority of those who make everlasting shipwreck carry that kind of sail. The pirates of death attack that kind of craft.

My mail bag was a mirror that reflected all sides of the world, and much that it showed me was pitifully sordid and reckless. Most of the letters I answered, others I destroyed.

The following one I saved, for obvious reasons. It was signed, “One of the Congregation”:

“Dear Sir, I do not believe much that you preach, but I am certain that you believe it all. To be a Christian I must believe the Bible. To be truthful, I do not believe it. I go to hear you preach because you preach the Bible as I was taught it in my youth, by a father, who, like yourself, believed what in the capacity of a preacher he proclaimed. For thirty-five years I have been anxious to walk in the path my mother is treading a simple faith. I have lived to see my children’s children, and the distance that lies between me and my real estate in the graveyard, cannot be very great. At my age, it would be worse than folly to argue, simply to confound or dispute merely for the love of arguing. My steps are already tottering, and I am lost in the wilderness. I pray because I am afraid not to pray. What can I do that I have not done, so that I can see clearly?”

All my sympathies were excited by this letter, because I had been in that quagmire myself. A student of Doctor Witherspoon once came to him and said, “I believe everything is imaginary! I myself am only an imaginary being.” The Doctor said to him, “Go down and hit your head against the college door, and if you are imaginary and the door imaginary, it won’t hurt you.”

A celebrated theological professor at Princeton was asked this, by a sceptic:

“You say, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. How do you account for the fact that your son is such a dissipated fellow?”

The doctor replied, “The promise is, that when he is old, he will not depart from it. My son is not old enough yet.” He grew old, and his faith returned. The Rev. Doctor Hall made the statement that he discovered in the biographies of one hundred clergymen that they all had sons who were clergymen, all piously inclined. There is no safe way to discuss religion, save from the heart; it evaporates when you dare to analyse its sacred element.

I received multitudes of letters written by anxious parents about sons who had just come to the city letters without end, asking aid for worthy individuals and institutions, which I could not meet even if I had an income of $500,000 per annum letters from men who told me that unless I sent them $25 by return mail they would jump into the East River letters from people a thousand miles away, saying if they couldn’t raise $1,500 to pay off a mortgage they would be sold out, and wouldn’t I send it to them letters of good advice, telling me how to preach, and the poorer the syntax and the etymology the more insistent the command. Many encouraging letters were a great help to me. Some letters of a spiritual beauty and power were magnificent tokens of a preacher’s work. Most of these letters were lacking in one thing Christian confidence. And yet, what noble examples there were of this quality in the world.

What an example was exhibited to all, when, on October 8, 1885, the organ at Westminster Abbey uttered its deep notes of mourning, at the funeral of Lord Shaftesbury, in England. It is well to remember such noblemen as he was. The chair at Exeter Hall, where he so often presided, should be always associated with him. His last public act, at 84 years of age, was to go forth in great feebleness and make an earnest protest against the infamies exposed by Mr. Stead in London. In that dying speech he called upon Parliament to defend the purity of the city. As far back as 1840, his voice in Parliament rang out against the oppression of factory workers, and he succeeded in securing better legislation for them. He worked and contributed for the ragged schools of England, by which over 200,000 poor children of London were redeemed. He was President of Bible and Missionary Societies, and was for thirty years President of the Young Men’s Christian Association. I never forgave Lord Macaulay for saying he hoped that the “praying of Exeter Hall would soon come to an end.” On his 80th birthday, a holiday was declared in honour of Lord Shaftesbury, and vast multitudes kept it. From the Lord Mayor himself to the girls of the Water Cress and Flower Mission, all offered him their congratulations. Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, wrote him, “Allow me to assure you in plain prose, how cordially I join with those who honour the Earl of Shaftesbury as a friend of the poor.” And, how modest was the Earl’s reply.

He said: “You have heard that which has been said in my honour. Let me remark with the deepest sincerity ascribe it not, I beseech you, to cant and hypocrisy that if these statements are partially true, it must be because power has been given me from above. It was not in me to do these things.”

How constantly through my life have I heard the same testimony of the power that answers prayer. I believed it, and I said it repeatedly, that the reason American politics had become the most corrupt element of our nation was because we had ignored the power of prayer. History everywhere confesses its force. The Huguenots took possession of the Carolinas in the name of God. William Penn settled Pennsylvania in the name of God. The Pilgrim Fathers settled New England in the name of God. Preceding the first gun of Bunker Hill, at the voice of prayer, all heads uncovered. In the war of 1812 an officer came to General Andrew Jackson and said, “There is an unusual noise in the camp; it ought to be stopped.” The General asked what this noise was. He was told it was the voice of prayer.

“God forbid that prayer and praise should be an unusual noise in the camp,” said General Jackson. “You had better go and join them.”

There was prayer at Valley Forge, at Monmouth, at Atlanta, at South Mountain, at Gettysburg. But the infamy of politics was broad and wide, and universal. Even the record of Andrew Johnson, our seventeenth President, was exhumed. He was charged with conspiracy against the United States Government. Because he came from a border State, where loyalty was more difficult than in the Northern States, he was accused of making a nefarious attack against our Government. I did not accept these charges. They were freighted with political purpose. I said then, in order to prove General Grant a good man, it was not necessary to try and prove that Johnson was a bad one. The President from Tennessee left no sons to vindicate his name. I never saw President Johnson but once, but I refused to believe these attacks upon him. They were an unwarranted persecution of the sacred memory of the dead. No man who has been eminently useful has escaped being eminently cursed.

At our local elections in Brooklyn, in the autumn of 1885, three candidates for mayor were nominated. They were all exceptionally good men. Two of them were personal friends of mine, General Catlin and Dr. Funk. Catlin had twice been brevetted for gallantry in the Civil War, and Dr. Funk was on the prohibition ticket, because he had represented prohibition all his life. Mr. Woodward, the third candidate, I did not know, but he was a strict Methodist, and that was recommendation enough. But there were pleasanter matters to think about than politics.

In November of this year, there appeared, at the Horticultural Hall in New York, a wonderful floral stranger from China the chrysanthemum. Thousands of people paid to go and see these constellations of beauty. It was a new plant to us then, and we went mad about it in true American fashion. To walk among these flowers was like crossing a corner of heaven. It became a mania of the times, almost like the tulip mania of Holland in the 17th century. People who had voted that the Chinese must go, voted that the Chinese chrysanthemum could stay. The rose was forgotten for the time being, and the violets, and the carnations, and the lily of the valley. In America we were still the children of the world, delighted with everything that was new and beautiful.

In Europe, the war dance of nations continued. In the twenty-two years preceding the year 1820 Christendom had paid ten billions of dollars for battles. The exorbitant taxes of Great Britain and the United States were results of war. There was a great wave of Gospel effort in America to counteract the European war fever. It permeated the legislature in Albany. One morning some members of the New York legislature inaugurated a prayer meeting in the room of the Court of Appeals, and that meeting, which began with six people, at the fifth session overflowed the room. Think of a Gospel Revival in the Albany Legislature! Yet why not just such meetings at all State Capitals, in this land of the Pilgrim Fathers, of the Huguenots, of the Dutch reformers, of the Hungarian exiles?

Occasionally, we were inspired by the record of honest political officials. My friend Thomas A. Hendricks died when he was Vice-president of the United States Government. He was an honest official, and yet he was charged with being a coward, a hypocrite, a traitor. He was a great soul. He withstood all the temptations of Washington in which so many men are lost. I met him first on a lecturing tour in the West. As I stepped on to the platform, I said, “Where is Governor Hendricks?” With a warmth and cordiality that came from the character of a man who loved all things that were true, he stood up, and instead of shaking hands, put both his arms around my shoulders, saying heartily, “Here I am.” I went on with my lecture with a certain pleasure in the feeling that we understood each other. Years after, I met him in his rooms in Washington, at the close of the first session as presiding officer of the Senate, and I loved him more and more. Many did not realise his brilliancy, because he had such poise of character, such even methods. The trouble has been, with so many men of great talent in Washington, that they stumble in a mire of dissipation. Mr. Hendricks never got aboard that railroad train so popular with political aspirants. The Dead River Grand Trunk Railroad is said to have for its stations Tippleton, Quarrelville, Guzzler’s Junction, Debauch Siding, Dismal Swamp, Black Tunnel, Murderer’s Gulch, Hangman’s Hollow, and the terminal known as Perdition.

Mr. Hendricks met one as a man ought always to meet men, without any airs of superiority, or without any appearance of being bored. A coal heaver would get from him as polite a bow as a chief justice. He kept his patience when he was being lied about. Speeches were put in his mouth which he never made, interviews were written, the language of which he never used. The newspapers that had lied about him, when he lived, turned hypocrites, and put their pages in mourning rules when he died. There were some men appointed to attend his memorial services in Indianapolis on November 30, 1885, whom I advised to stay away, and to employ their hours in reviewing those old campaign speeches, in which they had tried to make a scoundrel out of this man. They were not among those who could make a dead saint of him. Mr. Hendricks was a Christian, which made him invulnerable to violent attack. For many years he was a Presbyterian, afterwards he became associated with the Episcopal Church. His life began as a farmer’s boy at Shelbyville, his hands on the plough. He was a man who hated show, a man whose counsel in Church affairs was often sought. Men go through life, usually, with so many unconsidered ideals in its course, so many big moments in their lives that the world has never understood.

I remember I was in one of the western cities when the telegram announcing the death of Cornelius Vanderbilt came, and the appalling anxiety on all sides, for two days, was something unique in our national history. It was an event that proved more than anything in my lifetime the financial convalescence of the nation. When it was found that no financial crash followed the departure of the wealthiest man in America, all sensible people agreed that our recuperating prosperity as a nation was built on a rock. It had been a fictitious state of things before this. It was an event, which, years before, would have closed one half of the banks, and suspended hundreds of business firms. The passing of $200,000,000 from one hand to another, at an earlier period in our history would have shaken the continent with panic and disaster.

In watching where this $200,000,000 went to, we lost sight of the million dollars bequeathed by Mr. Vanderbilt to charity. Its destiny is worth recalling. $100,000 went to the Home and Foreign Missionary Society; $100,000 to a hospital; $100,000 to the Young Men’s Christian Association; $50,000 to the General Theological Seminary; $50,000 for Bibles and Prayer-Books; $50,000 to the Home for Incurables; $50,000 to the missionary societies for seamen; $50,000 to the Home for Intemperates; $50,000 to the Missionary Society of New York; $50,000 to the Museum of Art; $50,000 to the Museum of Natural History; and $100,000 to the Moravian Church. While the world at large was curious about the money Mr. Vanderbilt did not give to charity, I celebrate his memory for this one consecrated million.

He was a railroad king, and they were not popular with the masses in 1885-6. And yet, the Grand Central Depot in New York and the Union Depot in Philadelphia, were the palaces where railroad enterprise admitted the public to the crowning luxury of the age. Men of ordinary means, of ordinary ability, could not have achieved these things. And yet it was necessary to keep armed men in the cemetery to protect Mr. Vanderbilt’s remains. This sort of thing had happened before. Winter quarters were built near his tomb, for the shelter of a special constabulary. Since A.T. Stewart’s death, there had been no certainty as to where his remains were. Abraham Lincoln’s sepulchre was violated. Only a week before Mr. Vanderbilt’s death, the Phelps family vault at Binghamton, New York, was broken into. Pinkerton detectives surrounded Mr. Vanderbilt’s body on Staten Island. Wickedness was abroad in all directions, and there were but fifteen years of the nineteenth century left in which to redeem the past.

In the summer of 1886, Doctor Pasteur’s inoculations against hydrophobia, and Doctor Ferron’s experiments with cholera, following many years after Doctor Jenner’s inoculations against small-pox, were only segments of the circle which promised an ultimate cure for all the diseases flesh is heir to. Miracles were amongst us again. I had much more interest in these medical discoveries than I had in inventions, locomotive or bellicose. We required no inventions to take us faster than the limited express trains. We needed no brighter light than Edison’s. A new realm was opening for the doctors. Simultaneously, with the gleam of hope for a longer life, there appeared in Brooklyn an impudent demand, made by a combination of men known as the Brewers’ Association. They wanted more room for their beer. The mayor was asked to appoint a certain excise commissioner who was in favour of more beer gardens than we already had. They wanted to rule the city from their beer kegs. In my opinion, a beer garden is worse than a liquor saloon, because there were thousands of men and women who would enter a beer garden who would not enter a saloon. The beer gardens merely prepare new victims for the eventual sacrifice of alcoholism. Brooklyn was in danger of becoming a city of beer gardens, rather than a city of churches.

On January 24, 1886, the seventeenth year of my pastorate of the Brooklyn Tabernacle was celebrated. It was an hour for practical proof to my church that the people of Brooklyn approved of our work. By the number of pews taken, and by the amount of premiums paid in, I told them they would decide whether we were to stand still, to go backward, or to go ahead. We were, at this time, unable to accommodate the audiences that attended both Sabbath services. The lighting, the warming, the artistic equipment, all the immense expenses of the church, required a small fortune to maintain them. We had more friends than the Tabernacle had ever had before. At no time during my seventeen years’ residence in Brooklyn had there been so much religious prosperity there. The memberships of all churches were advancing. It was a gratifying year in the progress of the Gospel in Brooklyn. It had been achieved by constant fighting, under the spur of sound yet inspired convictions. How close the events of secular prominence were to the religious spirit, some of the ministers in Brooklyn had managed to impress upon the people. It was a course that I pursued almost from my first pastoral call, for I firmly believed that no event in the world was ever conceived that did not in some degree symbolise the purpose of human salvation.

When Mr. Parnell returned to England, I expected, from what I had seen and what I knew of him, that his indomitable force would accomplish a crisis for the cause of Ireland. My opinion always was that England and Ireland would each be better without the other. Mr. Parnell’s triumph on his return in January, 1886, seemed complete. He discharged the Cabinet in England, as he had discharged a previous Cabinet, and he had much to do with the appointment of their successors. I did not expect that he would hold the sceptre, but it was clear that he was holding it then like a true king of Ireland.

There was a storm came upon the giant cedars of American life about this time, which spread disaster upon our national strength. It was a storm that prostrated the Cedars of Lebanon.

Secretary Frelinghuysen, Vice-president Hendricks, ex-Governor Seymour, General Hancock, and John B. Gough were the victims. It was a cataclysm of fatality that impressed its sadness on the nation. The three mightiest agencies for public benefit are the printing press, the pulpit, and the platform. The decease of John B. Gough left the platforms of America without any orator as great as he had been. For thirty-five years his theme was temperance, and he died when the fight against liquor was hottest. He had a rare gift as a speaker. His influence with an audience was unlike that of any other of his contemporaries. He shortened the distance between a smile and a tear in oratory. He was one of the first, if not the first, American speaker who introduced dramatic skill in his speeches. He ransacked and taxed all the realm of wit and drama for his work. His was a magic from the heart. Dramatic power had so often been used for the degradation of society that speakers heretofore had assumed a strict reserve toward it. The theatre had claimed the drama, and the platform had ignored it. But Mr. Gough, in his great work of reform and relief, encouraged the disheartened, lifted the fallen, adopting the elements of drama in his appeals. He called for laughter from an audience, and it came; or, if he called for tears, they came as gently as the dew upon a meadow’s grass at dawn. Mr. Gough was the pioneer in platform effectiveness, the first orator to study the alchemy of human emotions, that he might stir them first, and mix them as he judged wisely. So many people spoke of the drama as though it was something built up outside of ourselves, as if it were necessary for us to attune our hearts to correspond with the human inventions of the dramatists. The drama, if it be true drama, is an echo from something divinely implanted. While some conscienceless people take this dramatic element and prostitute it in low play-houses, John B. Gough raised it to the glorious uses of setting forth the hideousness of vice and the splendour of virtue in the salvation of multitudes of inebriates. The dramatic poets of Europe have merely dramatised what was in the world’s heart; Mr. Gough interpreted the more sacred dramatic elements of the human heart. He abolished the old way of doing things on the platform, the didactic and the humdrum. He harnessed the dramatic element to religion. He lighted new fires of divine passion in our pulpits.

The new confidence that this wonderful Cedar of Lebanon put into the work of contemporary Christian labourers in the vineyard of sacred meaning is our eternal inheritance of his spirit. He left us his confidence.

When you destroy the confidence of man in man, you destroy society. The prevailing idea in American life was of a different character. National and civic affairs were full of plans to pull down, to make room for new builders. That was the trouble. There were more builders than there was space or need to build. A little repairing of old standards would have been better than tearing those we still remembered to pieces, merely to give others something to do.

All this led to the betrayal of man by man to bribery. It was not of much use for the pulpit to point it out. Men adopted bribery as a means to business activity. It was of no use to recall the brilliant moments of character in history, men would not read them. Their ancestry was a back number, the deeds of their ancestors mere old-fashioned narrowness of business. What if a member of the American Congress, Joseph Reed, during the American Revolution did refuse the 10,000 guineas offered by the foreign commissioners to betray the colonies? What if he did say “Gentlemen, I am a very poor man, but tell your King he is not rich enough to buy me”? The more fool he, not to appreciate his opportunities, not to take advantage of the momentary enterprise of his betters! A bribe offered became a compliment, and a bribe negotiated was a good day’s work. I had not much faith in the people who went about bragging how much they could get if they sold out. I refused to believe the sentiment of men who declared that every man had his price.

Old-fashioned honesty was not the cure either, because old-fashioned honesty, according to history, was not wholly disinterested. There never was a monopoly of righteousness in the world, though there was a coin of fair exchange between men who were intelligent enough to perceive its values, in which there was no alloy of bribery. Bribery was written, however, all over the first chapters of English, Irish, French, German, and American politics; but it was high time that, in America, we had a Court House or a City Hall, or a jail, or a post office, or a railroad, that did not involve a political job. At some time in their lives, every man and woman may be tempted to do wrong for compensation. It may be a bribe of position that is offered instead of money; but it was easy to foresee, in 1886, that there was a time coming when the most secret transaction of private and public life would come up for public scrutiny. Those of us who gave this warning were under suspicion of being harmless lunatics.

Necessarily, the dishonest transactions of the bosses led to discontent among the labouring classes, and a railroad strike came, and went, in the winter of 1886. Its successful adjustment was a credit to capital and labour, to our police competency, and to general municipal common-sense. In Chicago and St. Louis, this strike lasted several days; in Brooklyn, it was settled in a few hours. The deliverance left us facing the problem whether the differences between capital and labour in America would ever be settled. I was convinced that it could never be accomplished by the law of supply and demand, although we were constantly told so. It was a law that had done nothing to settle the feuds of past ages. The fact was that supply and demand had gone into partnership, proposing to swindle the earth. It is a diabolic law which will have to stand aside for a greater law of love, of co-operation, and of kindness. The establishment of a labour exchange, in Brooklyn in 1886, where labourers and capitalists could meet and prepare their plans, was a step in that direction.

I said to a very wealthy man, who employed thousands of men in his establishments in different cities:

“Have you had many strikes?”

“Never had a strike; I never will have one,” he said.

“How do you avoid them?” I asked.

“When prices go up or down, I call my men together in all my establishments. In ease of increased prosperity I range them around me in the warehouses at the noon hour, and I say, ’Boys, I am making money, more than usual, and I feel that you ought to share my success; I shall add five, or ten, or twenty per cent. to your wages.’ Times change. I must sell my goods at a low price, or not sell them at all. Then I say to them, ’Boys, I am losing money, and I must either stop altogether or run on half-time, or do with less hands. I thought I would call you together and ask your advice.’ There may be a halt for a minute or two, and then one of the men will step up and say, ’Boss, you have been good to us; we have got to sympathise with you. I don’t know how the others feel, but I propose we take off 20 per cent. from our wages, and when times get better, you can raise us,’ and the rest agree.”

That was the law of kindness.

Many of the best friends I had were American capitalists, and I said to them always, “You share with your employees in your prosperity, and they will share with you in your adversity.”

The rich man of America was not in need of conversion, for, in 1886, he had not become a monopolist as yet. He had accumulated fortunes by industry and hard work, and he was an energetic builder of national enterprise and civic pride, but his coffers were being drained by an increasing social extravagance that was beyond the requirements of happiness of home.