My study, and other essays

Front matter

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

" To the treatment of his subject Dr. Phelps brings such qualifications as very few me7i now living possess. He is one of those natures which are instinctively critical, and yet full of what Matthew Arnold happily calls ' sweet reasonableness.' "

Contents

NUMBER PAGE

I. My Study (I.) 1

II. My Study (II.) 13

Part I

It has been my lot to live for thirty years on a spot which has been the scene of a great, though unwritten, history. At the time when Andover Seminary was founded, as is well known, the old faith of New England was decadent. Its stanch friends were few. But one of the old churches of Boston was loyal to it. Even that one was of the school which, in the church-history of Scotland, is significantly titled " moderate." Its aged pastor was not the man to lift up a fallen banner, and lead a forlorn hope. A few godly men resolved that there should be one school of biblical learning in New England where a collegiately educated and orthodox clergy could be trained for the defense of the theology of the Pilgrims.

The "house I live in" was one of those built for the professors of the new " divinity school."

l

Its occupant, in his daily walk to his lecture-room, leaped from stone to stone through the swamp of a whortleberry lot in which Phillips Hall stood. The driver of the daily stage to the metropolis used to point out to his merry passengers the hillock on which the hall was erected as " Brimstone Hill," in token of the fiery and nauseous theology which he had been told was taught there. The tradition is, that one of the passengers on a wintry day responded by thrusting his hands out of the window, as if to warm them at a blazing fire. The sobriquet followed Dr. Griffin to the pastorate, to which he was soon called, of the Park-street Church in Boston. "Brimstone Corner" was the polite and fragrant cognomen which the angle of Tremont and Park Streets bore in the popular dialect of the time.

The late Charles Stoddard, Esq., of Boston, for many years the senior deacon of the Old South Church, has told me that he was more than once crowded off the sidewalk by well-dressed enemies of his faith while leading his mission school to church on a Sunday morning. It was not the first nor the last time that " fanatics " have found that they had no rights which " gentlemen " were bound to respect. A drayman in Tremont Street, who had missed his way with a load of sulphur, was once directed by a gentleman, of whom he made inquiry at a crossing, to go and deliver his freight at the house of a man by the name of Griffin which he would find on the door-plate, for "he was the chief dealer in the article in the city of Boston."

So general and intense was the antipathy to the ancient faith, that it swayed the learned professions, and gave tone to cultivated society. Young men beginning the practice of law or medicine in Boston found that they lost caste by attending an Orthodox church. When Andover Seminary was founded, it was doubtful whether a charter could be obtained from the Legislature. The institution was therefore attached as an annex to Phillips Academy, which already had a charter. Ten years later, when Amherst College was founded in the interest of the same religious views with those represented at Andover, the petition for a charter was again and again refused. The same was true when a charter was sought for the American Board for Foreign Missions.

The bitterness of that controversy was no more acrid than that which commonly attends the beginnings of religious disruptions. But such were the spirits in the air of Massachusetts when Dr. Griffin was called to Andover. In the building of his study he had a magnificent ideal of a workingroom for a studious recluse. It filled the southern wing of the house. The morning sun greeted its eastern windows ; the noonday sun gave it good cheer as he traveled southward; and the setting sun flooded it with a golden glory, in which few horizons equal that of Andover. The glow which illumined it from sun to sun was a fit emblem of the light which was to go from it around the world.

Dr. Griffin never occupied it. He was called to the pulpit of the Park-street Church just as he was about to take possession. Dr. Porter, his successor, was a lifelong invalid. Meetings of the faculty and others for conference were therefore held in his study. Thus the spot became memorable. The few leading minds who felt the gravity of the crisis in the history of our churches felt, also, the need of concentration of resources and of mutual alliance. For this purpose they established, in 1812, a weekly meeting for prayer and consultation. Its chief object was to devise ways and means of lifting the old faith of New England from the obsolescence into which it was falling. Then, as now, men called it " moribund." There are things which thrive in dying. That meeting was continued for many years, and was generally held in Dr. Porter's study. I find evidence of but one occasion on which it was held elsewhere.

During all that time that little conclave at Andover was the center of New-England Calvinism. Its regular attendants were seven : Dr. Woods ; Professor Stuart ; Dr. Porter ; Samuel Farrar, Esq., who was then the treasurer of the seminary, and one of the lay-theologians of the time ; Dr. John Adams, father of the late Rev. William Adams, D.D., of New York, and then principal of Phillips Academy ; Dr. Justin Edwards, the youthful pastor of the Old South Church in Andover ; and Mark

Newman, Esq., its senior deacon. To these should be added, as occasional guests, Dr. Griffin of Boston ; Dr. Pierson of Andover ; Dr. Worcester of Salem ; Dr. Morse of Charlestown ; Dr. Spring of Newburyport ; and, at a later period, Dr. Wisner of the Old South Church in Boston ; and Jeremiah Evarts, " the silent man," father of the present Hon. William M. Evarts of New York. These came, as occasion called them, to consult with the wise men on " Brimstone Hill."

In that thoughtful and devout conference were started the germs of great ideas. Here, as I write, those grave and reverend men seem to sit around me in grand council. I see their earnest faces. I hear their awe-struck voices as they kneel in prayer. I listen to their solid and growing thought as they talk of fruitful schemes, and throw out spontaneously the seed-thoughts of institutions which are to take their place in God's plans for building states and redeeming nations.

There sits Dr. Woods, slow and bland in speech, wise in counsel, safe in act, and masterly in compromise. Here stands or walks about, peering at the books, Professor Stuart, on whom, as he used to say, " The doctorate would never stick." He is quick in movement, original in plan, and intrepid in execution. The same mercurial traits appear in his professional character which made him the most agile athlete in Yale College fifteen years before. His alert mind keeps his tall, gaunt body in incessant motion. His head is never still. He rises to shut the door if it is open, and to open it if it is shut, or to work off the overplus of nerve by a needless thrust at the fire. He hurries on the business lest he should not live to see it matured. He is one of the chronic invalids who live in daily lookout for death, and who disappoint themselves by living as he did beyond the full threescore and ten.

Dr. Porter presides, erect, vigilant, and urbane. He is precise to a fault in the proprieties of time and place. His hollow cough is premonitory of the end yet twenty years away. Dr. Justin Edwards, of tall, angular frame, which moves like an ox, is silent till all the rest have had their say. Then he sums up the gist of the matter in a few terse words, which give the practical outcome of the business in hand. His colleagues recognize in his remarks the very wisdom they would have said if they had thought to put it so. There are men who are created to be chairmen of committees. They are born executives. As such they are great men. Other things they do — as they do. Dr. Edwards was one of them. Had he been bred to the bar, he would have found his way to the bench. In ancient Athens he would have been one of the Amphictyonic Council.

Great and good men invite caricature. The world does not caricature imbeciles. I remember seeing in my youth a rude woodcut representing the three leading spirits of the Andover Seminary. It portrayed their differences, if not reverently, yet not untruthfully. As I recall it, after forty years, it pictured a huge, clumsy machine, such as was then used for winnowing wheat. Doctors Porter and Woods and Professor Stuart are hard at work with it, dressed in the professional robe and bands. Dr. Woods is carefully, yet smilingly, as if he entered into the joke of the thing, dropping into the hopper pumpkins of goodly size, which have a rude carving on them of human faces. They remind one of the Jack-o'-lanterns we used to carve with jack-knives in harvest time when the pumpkin-fields were golden. Dr. Porter is picking them up with stately bend as they roll out from below in the form of little preachers, also full dressed in canonical bands and robe ; and he daintily brushes off the dust with a whiskbroom. Professor Stuart is working with might and main, with the impetuous look of a man who is putting his whole soul into it, turning the crank, and bending almost double. To use his own favorite phrase, he is "totus in Mis" Dr. Woods exclaims with anxious drawl, " Not-so-fast, Broth-er Stu-art, not-so-fast ! " The professor replies with a jerk, " Work away ! work away ! " Such were the pleasantries behind which conflict was going on in dead earnest.

The caricatures of an age, like its coins, are signs of its most truthful history. These men could afford to be caricatured. We may be very sure that they did not look glum over it. Grave men they were, who took life intensely ; but they were not of that class of devotees who, in a paroxysm of remorse, resolve that they will never laugh again. They were of too robust grain to be men of disconsolate and despotic conscience. They were believers in the inspiration of the Old Testament, and they took it literally that " fliere is a time to laugh." They were men before they were theologians ; and they had their comic side, like other men. They suffered no paralysis of the risible muscles. Dr. Porter I never saw: he had passed on before my time. But from what I know of the other two, and of their associates in the Andover Council, I can readily imagine that they at some time relieved the gravity of their long session by a canvass of the uncouth picture, and a hearty laugh over the likenesses so truth-telling of their leaders.

Since the foregoing paragraph was written, I have been informed of an incident which confirms it, and which discloses a new side to the character of Dr. Woods. On one occasion he was seen standing before a shop-window in Cornhill, examining this same caricature of himself and his colleagues. He was so intent upon it, that he did not at first perceive the approach of Dr. Ware, — his chief opponent in the controversy of the time, — who came up behind him. Dr. Ware at length tapped him on the shoulder, and said, " Goodmorning, Dr. Woods. I see that you have a new machine at Andover, by which you manufacture Orthodox ministers out of pumpkins." — " Ye-s,"

said Dr. Woods, with his inimitable deliberation of utterance, " ye-s : don't-you-want-to-comeup-there, and-be-ground-over ? " The sequence need not be told. Good-nature diluted the bitterness of that honorable warfare on both sides.

Those ancient men builded better than they knew, and some of them knew a great deal. Like all religiously earnest men, they thought and planned and acted for far-off coming time. Their life was energized by their faith that this world is to be converted to Jesus Christ. Their hands were on the wheels of its destiny, and they knew it. They felt the prophetic thrill of it in every nerve. They had faith in themselves as men chosen of God to apostolic service. There are men in the service of the Church whom the Church lifts: there are other men who lift the Church. Those Andover pioneers were of the latter class. They had a work of construction and of forecast to do, and they did it with a will.

It is said that every great discovery is a presentiment in somebody's mind before it is a fact in recorded science. That Andover company contained minds of the premonitory order. They were in profound sympathy with the biblical future of this world. When the prophetic book was unsealed, they were ready with the ways and means for executing its decrees. Had they been prophets, and sons of prophets, they could not have entered into the spirit of the opening age more cordially or more intelligently. Their life's work was prophecy

10 My Study: and Other Ussays.

fulfilled. Thej worked as all great workers do, in line with hidden providences and supernatural forces.

It was in that conference in Dr. Porter's study, that the project of American missions to the heathen first took the visible and tangible form which gave rise to the American Board. Judson, Nott, Newell, and Mills, the pioneer missionaries, were in the seminary. Their petition to the General Association of Massachusetts for support in their resolve to preach the gospel to the heathen was drawn up by the advice of the Andover brethren in council, who sent two of their number to advocate it before the fathers at Bradford. It is significant of the wary enterprise which it was thought necessary to practice in broaching the subject, that the names of Rice and Richards, which were at first appended to the memorial, were struck off, lest the Association should be alarmed by too large a number.

It is only in the beginnings of great movements that a timid diplomacy sways action. When the idea central to the movement gets possession of the popular mind, it goes with a rush. In the multitude of counselors all feel safe. Grooves of destiny begin to appear, and safety insures speed. Such was the early history of American missions. The prophetic thought at Andover anticipated what was coming. The group behind the haystack at Williamstown had adjourned to Andover, to find their plans matured, and purpose deepened, by the inspiration which came from Dr. Porter's study.

One feature of the movement is significant of the moral pressure under which both the missionaries and their advisers acted. Under the guidance of their Andover counselors, the young missionaries did not leave their going to the heathen dependent on the readiness of the Massachusetts churches to send them. Their going was a foregone conclusion. Go they must : it was fore-ordained. If Massachusetts had not consecrated wealth enough to send them, the Lord had. Could not God raise up men after his own heart from the very stones in the streets of Bradford ?

What was the secret of the intense conviction in the Andover conclave, that the gospel must be preached to the darkened nations ? It was their faith that this is a lost world. Without Christ it is doomed. They saw in vision the long procession of heathen souls unsaved passing on into a lost eternity. They were wakened to a great exigency. It brooked no delay. No dream of heathen probation after death blurred the vividness of their faith. Whatever may be true on that subject, their faith was fixed. They were a unit in it. So were the founders of the seminary and the churches of Massachusetts. The whole splendid structure of American missions to the heathen, with its magnificent history of achievement, had its origin in a profound, undoubting, intense, and unanimous belief that heathen probation began and ended here.

Was the Andover Creed silent about it? It said as little of the Book of Mormon. Polygamy could as normally be taught under its sanction as the discovery of a second probation. They were silent where they saw no reason to speak. They were practical men. It is not the way with practical men to build cob houses of defense against errors of which nobody has ever dreamed. Their action said more than their polemic words. It discloses where and how the wheels of their system of beliefs interlocked. Their whole missionary policy revolved around their faith in the restriction of heathen probation to this one life in this one world. Without that faith, that whole chapter in the history of those times would have been a fable. Those pioneer missionaries would have sought pastorates in the Green Mountains and among the hills of Berkshire. Their advisers in the Andover Conference would have rolled up the map of the heathen world, and put it away for ever.

They were not so taught of God. Their intense faith disclosed itself in a monumental work which continues to this day. Had it been the whole life's work of those seven men to bring into organized being the ideal of American missions to the heathen, they would have lived in the history of the millennium ; but that was not the whole.

n.

MY STUDY. part n.

I have told the story of the way in which my study became memorable in the history of the Massachusetts churches, and of its tribute to the organization of American missions to the heathen. Other institutions followed in natural sequence.

Here was originated the American Monthly Concert of Prayer for the conversion of the world. Something similar to it in Scotland had caught the eye of the Andover watchmen in their lookout for new ideas. It was talked over and prayed over in this place. Grave doubts were expressed. Would the churches feel interest enough in the heathen to meet and pray for them once a month ? The resolve to send four missionaries abroad was regarded by many as a doubtful movement. Dr. Dwight, president of Yale College, thought it unwise. So grave had the responsibility seemed, to those who must bear it, that one who was present when the memorial of the young missionaries was read, says, " We all held our breath." At the first meeting of the American Board at Farmington, a private parlor held all who were in attendance. They were just six persons. The prospect was not cheering to men of little faith.

What to do at a monthly concert to give it a distinctive character was an open question. One pastor of those times, in relating his pastoral reminiscences, said, " At our first monthly concert we could think of nothing to do but to read the closing prophecies of Isaiah." Even the missionary hymn was not then known to the American churches. Would the missions achieve success enough to sustain such a concert ? If they failed, what would be the effect of the re-action ? The heathen were a great way off. The experiment was a novelty. It had no history of success to reason from. Would it not be wise to wait until it had?

The wise men of Andover saw the two sides of things. But they were not of dilatory habit when the balance was once struck. They had committed themselves at Bradford to the project of missions to the heathen, and now the way to create a history of success was to back them up by concerted prayer. Any thing must succeed which was supported by supernatural auxiliaries. So they reasoned. A circular was sent forth to the churches, and the monthly concert found an unexpected welcome.

Where else in the wide world did so grand and far-reaching an institution ever spring from a beginning so diminutive ? Seven men, unknown to fame, meet for a plain talk in a private house in a country-town of Massachusetts, and their plain talk soon weaves an electric network of concerted prayer around the globe. Response comes from the islands of Pacific seas, and rejoinder from Constantinople and " flowery Ispahan."

The monthly concert was followed by the annual Concert of Prayer for Colleges. This also was one of the creative ideas which went forth from Dr. Porter's study. When we recall the religious awakenings in our colleges which have so often followed that anniversary, beginning at the very hour of its observance, we can not but revere the inspiration which put that thought into the minds of the men who gathered in this place to inquire of God. That idea of the combination of the forces of prayer for world-wide objects became from that time fixed in the spiritual policy of our churches. Then we first discovered what reduplicated power concert gives to religious enterprise. Concert in prayer reproduced itself in concerted action. It was enough to crown any man's life's work to initiate that conception as an executive factor in Christian history. It is the most significant illustration on record of the spiritual unity of the Church, and of its command of invisible resources.

In 1813 one of that vigilant band met with a little book which interested him by its compression of large materials into little space and portable form. The thought struck him, that religious literature may be made cheaper in cost, and circulated widely. He laid the matter before the Andover fraternity, and soon it grew into working-shape in the New-England Tract Society. Andover was the seat of its operations till 1825, when it became the American Tract Society at New York.

A little incident has come to my knowledge which illustrates the range of forethought, from great to small, and from small to great, which characterized the enterprise of those men. Professor Stuart was then just at the outset of his splendid career as the Father of Biblical Literature in America. He was absorbed in the construction of Hebrew grammars and the conquest of German learning. He * was teaching his own printers to set up Hebrew types. Yet he found time to supervise the first edition of American tracts, and he writes to the binder to be sure and make the covers attractive to the reader. He believed with George Herbert, that nothing is small in God's service ; and so said they all.

Dr. Porter was the son of the Hon. Judge Porter of Tinmouth, Vt. On one of his visits to his father, he heard of a little local society for the aid of young men in their education for the ministry. He called to it the attention of the next conference at Andover. There, as usual, the idea from the Green Mountains expanded into that of a national organization. A meeting was called in Boston, at which four of the Andover professors were appointed to draught a constitution, under which substantially the American Education Society has been in operation seventy years. It has aided in their training for the pulpit more than seven thousand men, most of whom could not otherwise have given to the Church the service of educated mind. More than one-half of the ordained missionaries of the American Board have been of their number, as well as many pastors of metropolitan churches, and many presidents and professors of our schools of learning.

We often laud and magnify the religious newspapers of our land. They rival the pulpit in moral power. The first weekly religious newspaper in the world was originated in the Andover conclave. The way in which it came about gives us a glimpse of the simple and natural processes by which great things were done there. Such things are not done by such men with blast of bugle, and beat of drum. On one evening the desecration of the Lord's Day comes up for discussion. A German conclave on the same topic would have appointed a committee to go home, and consider and inquire and investigate and collate and report on the nature of the Christian sabbath, and what constitutes its desecration. One of the Andover brethren, with quick Saxon sense, asks, " What can be done about it ? " Another replies, " Let us prepare short, pithy articles on the subject, and print them in the newspapers." A third responds, "Not a newspaper in the land would publish them." Then comes the upshot of the whole business, "It is high time that we had a newspaper that will." Here was " The Boston Recorder " in embryo ; the original of " The Congregationalist," and the pioneer of all kindred publications in the world. Said Dr. Morse, in writing to Mr. Farrar soon after, " We depend on you at Andover to ripen the plan. We are ready to unite in carrying it into execution."

It was the mission of that group at Andover to "ripen plans" of great things with small beginnings. Theirs were inventive and constructive minds. They illustrated the fact, of which Mr. Froude has made emphatic mention, that hardheaded Calvinist thinkers are long-headed, practical workers. In their thinking, they exalted God : in their working, God honored them. They illustrated also the fact, so often observed in unwritten history, that earnest men, by simply walking in the way of duty, and doing that which most imperatively needs to be done, will inevitably do great things. They can not help it. The plain way of duty is the highway of greatness. The word " ought " is kindred to every great thing in the universe.

They have a custom, in the villages on the Rhine, of anchoring a grist-mill in the middle of the river, where the current is strongest, and making the rapids grind the food of the whole community. The river is a docile laborer. "It asks for no wages," threatens no strikes, and never quits work for a carouse. It puts into the mill a power independent of drawbacks, and which has no caprices. So let any man plant himself in the midstream of God's plans, and take manful grip at the thing that first comes to hand, working with a will at it, and the current of eternal decree will impart its own momentum to his work, so that it will grow into grand achievement. The law of spiritual gravitation works in line with such men. Every such man stands in the thick of godlike opportunity. So was it with the simple-minded yet eager men of the Andover brotherhood. They seized the thought which came from God to them through the exigency of the time, and did their duty about it like men ; and great things came of it. It was not the scintillation of meteoric genius : it was the gravitation of consecrated common sense. It was more than the founding of an empire to pioneer into the world the weekly religious press. In a similar manner the American Home Missionary Society came to its birth on this spot. The need of pastors for feeble churches was imperative. Pioneer preachers for the founding of churches in the waste places of the West were wanted. It was the ambition of the men at Andover to send an educated ministry westward as fast as emigration could blaze trees for roadways through the wilderness. But how should the churches in regions where commerce was carried on by barter, support pastors who had nothing that was worth barter? It was a grave question. But to the inventive enterprise of the Andover circle, to ask it was to answer it. It was not their way to moon oyer difficulties.

There had been for a considerable time local societies, scattered here and there, limited by State and county lines, for the aid of feeble churches. In a single evening the deliberations at Andover matured a plan for making those isolated associations auxiliary to a national institution which should lift the work up into national importance. The American Home Missionary Society was the result of that evening's session. At this date it has assisted nearly five thousand churches. Most of these have been in localities which could not otherwise have received the ministrations of the gospel in season to give character to the great States of the North- West. Many of them were planted at strategic points at which the dominant moral power ruled the infancy of those States. Here, again, great effects from little causes are illustrated in the history of that fragment of the olden time which we are reviewing.

No more magnificent illustration of the same thing can be found than that furnished by the history of the temperance reform. It is not generally known that all the organizations now existing for the promotion of abstinence from intoxicating liquors owe their origin ultimately to the Andover Conference.

Things happened in this wise : in 1814 Dr. Edwards formed in his congregation a society called "The Andover South Parish Society for doing good." The homeliness of its title suggests the simplicity of its aim. One object named in its constitution was "to promote temperance." His afterthought was, that that method of " doing good " was capable of expansion. He brought it to the notice of his colleagues in Dr. Porter's study. The result was the formation of a society entitled " An Association of Heads of Families for the Promotion of Temperance." The first seven names signed to its pledge of total abstinence were those of members of the little fraternity whose life's work is here recorded. That was the first organized movement in the world founded on the pledge of entire abstinence from intoxicating drinks. The same consultations led circuitously to the founding of the American Temperance Society. For several years the Andover brotherhood numbered among its members Rev. Dr. Hewitt, whose career as the " apostle of temperance " has been equaled by no one but that of John B. Gough. His eloquence is remembered to this day, by those who heard it, as something wonderful in the history of public debate.