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