Reminiscences of present-day saints

Front matter

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Sermons to Young Men by Francis Greenwood Peabody

Preface

THE word ‘Saint’ has had a curious history of ecclesiastical limitation. It has been a title given, as a rule, either to the immediate disciples of Jesus, some of whom, according to the record, were not distinguished for saintliness and at the crisis of his fate ‘forsook him and fled’; or, on the other hand, to the martyrs or miracle-workers who have in later centuries won the reverence of the Church. Apostolt, martyres, orate pro nobis, became the prayer of invocation addressed to the saints.

The New Testament usage was more generous. The ‘saints’ were simply those who had committed themselves to the cause of Christ, not as exceptionally pious persons or as endowed to work miracles, but as testifying by the conduct of their lives to the influence of their Master. They were ‘called to be saints,’ ‘sanctified in Christ Jesus,’ ‘called unto holiness,’ ‘faithful in Christ Jesus.’ One of them might be tempted to doubt, another to deny; and the most influential of them confessed such wrestlings of the flesh with the spirit that it might seem strange to give him the title of ‘Saint Paul.’ Yet the confessedly incomplete, but finally dominating, direction of conduct towards the ideals of Christian living was precisely what gave them the right to be called

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Wreface saints. ‘Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect,’ writes Saint Paul, °... but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.’ More than sixty times the word ‘saint’ thus occurs in the New Testament, not as the title of a few beatified souls, but as the general appellation of loyal Christians, and this ‘unrestricted application of the term,’ it is authoritatively stated, ‘survived until the time of Irenzus and Tertullian.’ *

As I look back on a long life of exceptional privilege and opportunity, I find myself deeply impressed by observing the number of acquaintances or friends who deserve to be remembered, in this New Testament sense, as saints. They were not so designated by any ecclesiastical authority; they would have disclaimed any honorific distinction; they were simply consistent Christians, for whom holiness was but another name for wholeness or health, the dedication of the whole of life to the Christian Way. By the fortunate circumstances of my childhood, education, and professional life, I have been environed by these characters, whose piety was steadied by wisdom and whose gifts were dedicated to service. It has become a fashion of late for biographers to reexamine the lives of heroes or saints, and to expose

t Herzog, Encycl. v, 670; Smith’s Bible Dict. s. v.

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Preface the foibles and failings which made them less heroic or saintly, and more like commonplace sinners. It would seem to be quite as legitimate — and certainly much more inviting — to turn in the opposite direction, and apply one’s self, not to efface the halos which piety has drawn round undeserving figures, but to realize that, even within the circle of one’s own experience or memory, there have been lives, some of them conspicuous and some obscure, which teach one what saintliness means. Much has been written also of late about sinners, great and small; and the records of criminality and self-indulgence have offered alluring material for historians to review and for the daily press to exhibit in nauseating detail. Is it not time to call attention to the dimensions and the dramatic interest of goodness, and to review the evidences, in literature or life, which justify faith in integrity and consecration?

Almost any one could compile a list of such uncanonized saints among the influences which have guided or restrained his life, and the names which I have here brought together are but a few of the many which I am tempted to recall. It has been a problem, not of discovering, but of selecting, subjects of reminiscence. Some of those whom I describe were teachers; some were preachers; some were men of affairs; one was a soldier; one a statesman; one a Wall Street merchant; one a country school teacher; two were women; but from them all,

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Wreface as from stars of greater or less magnitude, there radiated illumination and beauty; and it has seemed to me possible that others might be reassured, as I have been, by observing, through the clouds of materialism and commercialism that drift across one’s sky, how secure and undimmed the stars remain. Laurence Oliphant once said that what England most needed in his time was ‘a spiritually-minded man of the world.’ That is the type of character which I here recall. It confirms one’s faith in what the Christian Church has called the ‘Communion of Saints’; not of saints detached from the world, but of men and women of the world who could interpret its transient incidents with the serenity and insight of spiritual minds.

These figures range themselves in my memory along my own path of life, as though at each of its turnings or crossings one of them stood, to direct or deter or lead the way; and as I approach a study of their characters, I am led to review the occasions when I fell in with such trustworthy guides. The result is not an autobiography, but a series of disconnected sketches. Personal experiences are narrated when they make points of contact with lives more deserving of record; circumstances of acquaintance or friendship serve as frames in which to set Reminiscences of Present-Day Saints.

Contents

. FrrepRIcH AuGUST GOTTREU THOLUCK . EDWARD EVERETT HALE

. ALFRED TREDWAY WHITE

. Car HILTy

CHAPTER I EPHRAIM PEABODY MUST have been a very backward little boy, for

I was nearly seven years old when my father died, and I can remember hardly anything of his appearance or his teaching. He was, it is true, slowly dying through the last two years of his short life, and his children were lodged with friends while he vainly sought by change of climate to arrest the progress of insidious disease. Yet it would seem that one who so profoundly impressed other lives, both old and young, must have given some farewell counsel which even the youngest of his children could never forget, and that something more than a gaunt figure in the high pulpit of King’s Chapel, and a hushed and darkened home of sorrow, should remain as personal reminiscences.

The only vivid recollection which survives of worship during my childhood in the beautiful old church is of so frivolous a nature that it should perhaps be resolutely forgotten; yet it persists in recurring whenever, after seventy years, I glance upward at the noble Corinthian columns and their ornate capitals, Round the ceiling of the chancel are ranged a series of projecting and decorated brack- — ets, known, I believe, in the language of Greek architecture, as modillions; and the intervening

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Wresent-Day Daints spaces seemed to the discerning eyes of a little boy created to serve as stalls where one might keep a stud of imaginary horses. Perched on a high cricket and propped against my mother’s knees, my eyes looked upward with a fixity and rapture of gaze which may have indicated to my family a precocious piety, but which was in fact watching my chariots, as they emerged from their little stalls and raced round the track laid out on the ceiling of the entire church. In so entrancing and exhilarating an occupation no sermon seemed too long, and my only apprehension was that the closing hymn might be announced before I had safely stabled my panting steeds.

There would, therefore, seem to be slight justification for including among these reminiscences of saints the meagre memory of so remote a figure, or of so infantile a preoccupation. Yet, in fact, the influence of my father’s character was felt by his children with imperative command long after he died, and the parental guidance which I just failed to receive was revived and perpetuated through the unremitting devotion of ‘his remarkable wife. She was born and bred under conditions very different from those of her husband; a cultivated, gay, and luxury-loving girl; but she subdued her buoyant temperament to his serene and serious spirit, and, being left a widow, in middle life, with a young family, made it her daily rule and practice to direct

Ephraim BWeabody her home as he would wish. Each morning began with family prayers; each Sunday demanded attendance at two services of worship with an intervening Sunday School, and a gathering at twilight for the repeating of hymns and Bible passages. Each child must offer a fresh chapter for recitation, and there was much scrutiny devoted by the children to the discovery of the shortest Psalm.

The effort thus to remould her lively temperament for this graver task made my mother’s discipline more rigorous than my father’s gentle spirit might have enforced. All was for his sake; each decision of school or play was as he would have desired ; and while his living presence grew dim, the memory of him remained vivid and imperative through this vigorous fulfilment of his slightest wish. Thus my boyhood was in a singular degree directed by an invisible influence and restrained by a transmitted memory. The conduct of life—as, for example, in abstinence from tobacco — was dictated by the wish of my father, reported to me by my mother, that I should not smoke while in college; by the end of which term of prohibition the habit had lost its persuasiveness —a loss which I have to confess deprives me of one comforting solace of old age. I hardly know which parental influence was more imperative — the intimation of a father’s wishes or the dictation of a mother’s will. It is a pathetic memory of family life that for a score of years

Thanksgiving Day was never celebrated in our home because it was the day on which my father died. The crayon portrait by Cheney hung before the family in our living-room and seemed to watch us all with serene and searching eyes, like a living presence of chastening and refining love; and these memories seem to justify me in recalling my father’s influence as immediately controlling, even though indirectly felt and vicariously enforced.

Nor can I dismiss these memories of childhood without testifying to the singularly good fortune it was for a boy to be born and bred in the home of a consecrated parish minister. It is sometimes suggested that ministers’ sons are likely to be repelled by the excessive piety of their environment, and to remember the inhibitions of their childhood rather than its inspirations. Nothing could be more unjust to the great majority of these devout and consistent homes; and least of all where the memory of the father had become a great part of the mother’s religion. My mother was left with four maturing children and with very restricted means, yet every opportunity of education was secured for her children, and every instinct of domestic unity and affection was quickened and confirmed. The youngest boy had his full share of sidewalk-shovelling and boot-blacking, on a wage scale which was rather to be regarded as a honorarium than as a compensation; and among the family traditions there long

Ephraim PBeabodp remained the tale that when a bucket of water must be carried upstairs and some one suggested a little ‘filthy lucre’ might be of assistance, the small boy — none too scrupulous in the use of water for personal hygiene—retorted that he was quite willing todo the work but protested against being called bad names.

Most of my playmates were from luxurious homes; but I cannot recall any sense of contrast or inclination to envy. Healthy boys are, in fact, the most consistent of democrats. They do not really care for distinctions which grown-up people observe. Many of the elaborate entertainments provided by my companions on Beacon Hill were repressed by the presence of maids and butlers; and there was quite as much hilarity among us when we sat at my home on the rug before the fire, and munched nuts and apples. Our only heroes were the boys who could run fastest or play most fearlessly, and indifference to finery was a part of self-respect.

Much more notable than this reminiscence of pure democracy was the stamp set on childhood by a home full of books. My father had indulged himself, during a short journey in Europe, in collecting some illustrated descriptions of places and galleries; and, like most ministers, he had acquired from grateful parishoners a few well-bound volumes. The real education of a little boy thus began, not in the completely mechanical routine of the dame-school, but in the untutored intimacy with good books half understood, and good pictures half appreciated. The hearthrug was my academy, and the ‘Musée Francais, ‘Women of the Bible,’ or ‘Roman Antiquities,’ my textbooks; and the pupil in that school of the eye and heart, sprawled before the fire, dragged down his guides from their shelves, and made the grand tour of Europe on his stomach. Thirty years later, when I reached Athens, I was almost startled to have a feeling of being at home and knowing my way, and to recall that I had often inspected the monuments and climbed to the Acropolis with my father’s big books as the Baedekers of my imagination. Nothing that school or college can do’to wake a young mind — and their effect is often soporific — can compare with these fireside travels through the fairyland of art, or the listening to poetry, even when but half understood, at ‘that best academe, a mother’s knee’; and when this unforced, and often unconscious, education is through the books which one’s own father has gathered with such affection and self-restraint, literature and life unite as masters, and the boy learns not by rote but by heart. Reflections like these tempt one to confuse hearsay with memory and to report as reminiscence what may be in fact tradition.

_ EpxHratm PEABODY was born in 1807 at Wilton, New Hampshire, and died at Boston in 1856, at the 6

Ephraim Beabodyp age of forty-nine! His father, another Ephraim, was at once village blacksmith, justice of the peace, selectman, and in 1815 a member of the State Legislature. The work of the smithy was a training in integrity and force. This stalwart craftsman won as his wife the daughter of the village squire, Abiel Abbot, and brought her from the ancestral home on Abbot Hill to a house on the ‘Intervale,’ still picturesque even in decay, under a majestic elm on the bank of a lovely river, and held together by nails shaped by the builder’s own hands. The marriage was a union of two unadulterated English stocks, inheriting the tradition of Puritanism for a century and a half, and trained in the pious simplicity of rural New England.

In 1816, the husband, though but forty years of age, died, and his widow Rhoda, a woman of severe beauty, determined will, and with a lurking sense of humor detected in her deep-set eyes, but retreating as if ashamed, was left to rear her two children, a son and a daughter. Puritan thrift relieved the little family from any sense of poverty, and Puritan habits disguised affection. Rhoda’s son once said, in recalling his childhood, that he could not remember his mother ever kissing him; but, on the other hand, wrote that ‘he never knew her to show symptoms of impatience or anger,’ and in a letter to her from

1 The story is told in greater detail in ‘A New England Romance.’ Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920.

college, ‘Your children owe more to you a thousand fold than they can ever repay.’

At the age of thirteen Ephraim was sent to Phillips Academy, Exeter, where his mother’s cousin, Benjamin Abbot, was head-master; and three years later, in 1823, he entered Bowdoin College, graduating in 1827, at the age of twenty. Here was soon touched the note in his disposition which was to become most characteristic and dominating. He was by temperament, and often by a spiritual compulsion of which he was but half aware, essentially a poet; imaginative, reflective, and observant of nature and life. Even in his childhood, as his boyish diary recorded, he would lie on his back to watch the flight of partridges; and in late manhood, when calling the attention of a friend to a summer cloud, he said : ‘How often when I was a boy have I thrown myself on the ground and watched such a cloud as that, expecting to see the faces of angels leaning over its edge.’

James Martineau, in a classic paragraph, has not hesitated to affirm ‘the close affinity, perhaps ultimate identity, of religion and poetry’; and it must be admitted that the poets have gained a permanence in religious influence which the theologians can hardly claim. Dante remains an interpreter of the soul’s wanderings while the popes and dignitaries of his day are remembered only if mentioned by him. Milton has outlived Laud. Wordsworth teaches the religion of nature to many who are unresponsive to the doctrines of the Church. The religious mood of the Victorian era was more clearly uttered by Tennyson and Browning, and its questionings by Arnold and Clough, than by the academic expositors or critics of their day. John Henry Newman is familiar to millions through his ‘Lead, Kindly Light,’ to whom his defence of authority makes no appeal.

It was this way of self-expression which opened before the young mystic, Ephraim Peabody. The magazines and societies of Bowdoin College offered him a channel of utterance, and the romantic poets of his time, Gray, Cowper, and Wordsworth, directed its course. He contributed reflective essays and verses to the ‘Escritoir,’ a college journal of brief and languishing life, on subjects like ‘A Night in the Woods’; he delivered a ‘Poem in Spenserian Stanzas’ at a society of college mates; and as his Commencement part he gave a poem entitled ‘The Becalmed Ship’ —a title curiously suggestive of the temporary lack of determined course which is not infrequent in young men about to graduate from college.

Among these boyish flights of imagination, which often betray a limited or unassimilated experience, the only lines which have met the test of time are, as might be surmised, the ones which are least concerned with Wordsworthian reflections. His

‘Skater’s Song’ has the agility and momentum of real experience, and it has been lately welcomed, essentially as it was written, as material well adapted for musical setting. Indeed, the verses give a pleasant indication that the ascetic student was not without his share in the athletic joys of a normal youth. ‘Away, away, o’er the sheeted ice, Away, away, we go; On our steel-bound feet we move as fleet As deer o’er the Lapland snow.

‘But as for me, away, away, Where the merry skaters be,

Where the fresh wind blows and the smooth ice glows There is the place for me.’

Bowdoin College recognized the young poet, and twenty-five years after his graduation, in 1852, he gave the poem at the semi-centennial of the College. Harvard College also appreciated his gift, and in 1835 he was appointed poet of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In a word, the sense of kinship between religion and poetry grew more vivid and sustaining as his thought and life grew more mature.

A striking evidence of the unconsciousness with which this gift for poetry may be possessed was later given when, at the close of Ephraim Peabody’s life, a collection of his sermons was made, selected in great part by himself, and posthumously published. Both he and his affectionate editors were tempted to regard as most important and typical his contributions to the theological thought of his time, and they set in the foreground of this volume his discourses on ‘Miraculous Interposition,’ ‘Authority, ‘The Resurrection of Christ,’ ‘Nature with and Without a Revelation of Immortality,’ to which, no doubt, he had given his most laborious reflection. Many a teacher or preacher has been thus inclined to estimate as his best work what was hardest for him to do, and to fancy that his arguments would be more convincing than his visions. The fact is, however, that the most permanent teaching is likely to be conveyed by the most unintended self-expression, and that a lyric of the soul may outlive a proof of God. ‘If a man were permitted,’ said Fletcher of Saltoun, ‘to make all the ballads, he need ‘not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ If a man, it might be said to the same effect, be permitted to report his own experience of the life of God in the souls of men, he may leave to others the defence of theism.

So it was with this poet-preacher. When one turns back to this volume, published seventy years ago, the argumentative discourses which involved such exacting toil are seen to have lost their interest or even their validity, while the lyric themes which were more congenial to the writer still speak the timeless language of the spirit. ‘The Voice Behind Thee,’ ‘Stillness of Mind,’ ‘Stand in thy Lot,’ ‘The Lamps are Gone Out,’ and, more than all,

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‘Chambers of Imagery’ —are still cherished by readers who recognize in them the kinship of religion with poetry. ‘Come,’ says the last of these sermons, ‘and by that door to which all have the keys enter these halls of imagery within the human soul. Light up the torches and raise them aloft that we may see what is upon the walls.’ That was a summons to self-scrutiny which was not of one period of theological thought, but as timeless as the beauty of holiness or the ugliness of sin.

Even a theological sermon is relieved in its argumentation by the lighter touch of the poet. Thus in his defence of ‘Miraculous interposition,’ he says: ‘The mariner drifts day by day on the ocean in the midst of a summer calm; the night sinks down over the tranquil waters. No sound comes from the sea; but at night the winds break forth and the mountainous waves chase each other toward the rocky shore. Suddenly the stroke of a bell is heard — scarce heard at first, but louder and ever louder — tolling, pausing, tolling, ringing — its strange chimes blending with the storm and heard, now low, now loud, amid the fury of the gale. The established order which the mariner had observed was silence. He knew not that wise foresight had hung by the coast of peril this voice, silent when all was peaceful, but which, when the storm beat and the waves rose and danger threatened, should be ready to clang forth its warnings. Would this be a violation of law?

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No, only a variation of the accustomed order, produced by causes not coming forth into action until the appointed moment had arrived.’

With these gifts of a poet and this training of a Puritan, Ephraim Peabody was inevitably led from college toward the vocation of the ministry, and after three arid years of theological curriculum in the Harvard Divinity School he proceeded to what was then the frontier town of Meadville, Pennsylvania ; thence to the larger pastoral responsibility of New Bedford, and finally to Boston. Twenty years before his death symptoms of pulmonary disease had appeared, and just before the day of his Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard University, in 1827, a hemorrhage foretold his doom. In his time, the attitude, even of intelligent people, toward the approach of tuberculosis was not that of resistance, but that of resignation. Ephraim Peabody, with the frame of a blacksmith and the clean inheritances of a Puritan stock, might in all probability have recovered his strength under the modern treatment of sunshine and invigorating climate; but in his generation, when the signs of susceptibility asserted themselves, the only reasonable use of remaining life was to mitigate and prolong the preparation for death. The sedentary habit of a minister’s life contributed to this decline of vitality. Scientific precautions might perhaps have fortified his constitution; but the persistent symptoms had for him the mark of inevitable destiny. He found temporary relief by migrating to Mobile, where, he wrote, ‘he threw off disease as a garment in the open woods of Alabama.’ But the garment clung to him and the solitude depressed him, and with his brave wife he migrated back to New England and had seven happy years in New Bedford, and ten more at King’s Chapel before he completely surrendered, in 1856, to merciless disease.

It is not impossible that this consciousness of an impending fate contributed to stimulate his intellectual activity. Articles in the ‘North American Review,’ then the most important organ of New England culture, testified to his eager thought. The organization of the Boston Fraternity of Churches was in large part through his efforts, and the records of the Boston Provident Association testify that it ‘chiefly owes its origin to him.’ Yet it was not through these conscientious undertakings of social amelioration that he gained his influence over the congregation he served; but by the indisputable evidence he gave of a life in habitual communion with the Eternal. It may be that his manifest invalidism. intensified this impression of spirituality. The progress of tuberculosis is not infrequently accompanied by an intensity of gaze and a stimulation of faculties, as though the soul looked with less hindrance through the bars of the body. Such was the testimony of many observers concerning the last years of Ephraim Peabody, and this impression is confirmed by the gracious and ascetic features which his portrait presents. ‘His eyes,’ one friend wrote of him, ‘open to you like the great ocean under the gentle and solemn stars’; and another listener described him as ‘so gentle and so grave it might be thought one of the old Puritans, leaving his austerity behind and keeping his righteousness, had appeared in our generation.’

A further trait became in these last years conspicuous which might have seemed inconsistent with so unworldly a character. It was a surprising endowment of wisdom concerning affairs of this world, not derived from what is called worldly experience, but from the observation of that experience with detachment and horizon. It was like the survey which an aviator makes as he looks down on the ground plan of a town, and notes, as those walking below cannot, the line of its avenues and open places and the spots of its congestion and crookedness. It was the ‘wisdom which is from above,’ discerning and direct, of things below. ‘In one respect,’ a friend wrote of him, ‘he was the most remarkable man it has been my fortune to meet; and that was in the union of a childlike simplicity with a singular knowledge of men. His judgments of the characters of those with whom he came in contact were really wonderful. All shams, all pretence, all mere outside coverings seemed to fall at once before his mild eye; and although his opinions were invariably announced with great caution, and he always took the most lenient view possible, it was clear that he understood perfectly the real character of those whom he knew,’ Thus it was that men of the professional and business world turned to this unsophisticated, but clarified, mind, and made it their counsellor and confessor. ‘It was sometimes difficult,’ a colleague said, ‘to understand how he acquired such an influence. He was not a man of extraordinary learning, yet it was impossible to be with him and not be influenced by his opinions. .. . The secret of his power was in his honesty, simplicity, and wisdom. He was the most extraordinary judge of character it was ever my fortune to know.’

It is curious to find in one of Ephraim Peabody’s sermons a recognition of this faculty of insight which he would have been the last to claim for himself. ‘Who has not,’ he says, ‘again and again seen ordinary minds under a powerful religious influence rising almost to the level of genius? ... A good conscience sometimes seems almost identical with wisdom. Who has not seen ignorant men, quite incompetent to defend their opinions, possessing an almost fatal certainty of judgment, especially in regard to the moral character both of ends and men? The secret of it was that they were seeking only what was right, and in seeking what was right they have taken the shortest road to what is wise.’

This lucidity of mind, free from all blur of selfinterest, gave to his conversation a singular transparency and insight. ‘It was,’ a brilliant colleague has said, ‘a continuous, unpremeditated overflow of clear, sparkling, gentle waters. It appeared as if his mind, having filled up with its natural variety, quietly let it ripple over the margin of his lips. It was not a talk, but a release of ideas. He let the mirth of others break into his lapsing talk like the occurring of ripples in a serene course. But his mind seemed most naturally engaged in the equable diffusion of its own surplus, and to deposit golden instructions and suggestions by the way, not to leap wide in flashes nor to settle in dark places.’

Such, in brief outline, were some of the characteristics of this unassuming and inconspicuous minister of Christ, who was invalided before he was forty, died when only forty-nine, and was never distinguished for learning or leadership. ‘He was,’ as his more eloquent friend George Putnam said, ‘not always an impressive preacher, not being largely endowed with those gifts of temperament which constitute a born orator. . . His reliance was upon what he was utterly unconscious of — the apostolic gravity, simplicity, sincerity, and weight of his own presence and character. He wist not that his face shone.’