From romance to reality; the merging of a life in a world movement, an autobiography

Front matter

mm

-.

HENRY CLAY MABIE.D.D., LL.D

Contents

PAGE

Foreword 9

IN TUTELAGE

Foreword

IT has sometimes been brought as a reproach against the inception of modern missions that it was attended with elements of romance. Such elements were incidental to the novelties of travel and residence in regions long inaccessible to the Western world. The tales of new conditions and picturesque environments doubtless seized the imagination of the unsophisticated and adventurous, and added to the sentimental attractiveness of Oriental situations. Probably some were superficially led to give themselves to the exploitation of these conditions.

But even so, human nature in itself is so constituted as to respond to such situations. And this is not necessarily evil. Youth particularly takes roseate views of life. It is imaginative and eager to find approach to strange and distant peoples, and it is worthy of note that missionaries, as a rule, awake to their sense of a divine call early in life, a matter in itself highly providential.

Imagination, as a susceptibility and a power, is itself a foremost endowment of mankind. Without it there would be no creative faculty or inventive genius. The sense of the romantic grows out of these capacities, and is a legitimate source of mental and moral awakening. The susceptibility of the genus homo to sentiment is a noble possibility. It is the highway to something far worthier than sentimentalism. Without sentiment, life would be robbed of its chief incitements and inspirations.

That certain stages of disillusionment must necessarily be passed in the school of life, and even religion, per se, is not ominous: it is essential to life's discipline. Moreover, the deeper insights are commonly reached through forms of disappointment preliminary to deeper

FOREWORD things. "It is for chastening that ye endure." The most exalted stages of experience and being are reached through processes of trial.

A sober second thought will remind us that much that has been called romance is, after all, the deeper and diviner exhilaration of the living martyr, such as is represented in the high testimonies of worthies like the Judsons, the Livingstones and the Patons. The exalted soul-conditions which characterize such, mark the divine survival in their subjects of the very resurrection life of Christ, issuing from crucial pains in fellowship with Christ. They signify the very highest sort of attainments in moral being. Surely the Schwartzes, the Morrisons, the Pattisons, the Binghams, and the heroes of the South Sea islands, were not mere romanticists.

So the writer of the following pages frankly testifies that though in childhood the imagination was caught and sentiment roused, yet these were but initial stages to divinely intended processes and realizations involved in the plan of the whole, cherished by the Eternal for one life at least. If the adolescent stage had been otherwise, the mature life would have been reduced to a lower level.

So long as reality in the end is reached, the more "romance" in the early awakening, the better. The chapters that follow one another in this volume certainly would never have been written but for a spiritual dynamic incipient in childhood, as touching the matters dealt with. And in the opinion of the writer, most real achievement in *.ny form of living is usually preceded by an awakened, divinely fertilized youth. When the period of romance is no more, the race will cease to grow, to invent or to create, and reality itself will perish.

For the real raison d'etre of this book one must look beyond the individual factor in the author's life. Were this all, even the realities emphasized would probably never have found expression in a book.

In the providence of God, however, the writer has been thrown throughout his life into contact with so many personages of note, and through them into

FOREWORD touch with so significant movements in many lands, that it seems fitting that these be introduced into the narratives that follow, and allowed to figure as they may.

Entirely apart from the personality of him who records the parts played by these men and movements, there are worths to be conserved for the church at large. These values started with high enthusiasm also ; and in their time and place came to realizations similar to the author's own, and congruous with them. Were these in the Christian and world-wide movements of the last century to remain unexpressed, "the very stones would cry out." Hence the record of the respective parts played and recorded in the following narratives.

To the great Head of the church these chapters are committed in the hope that His blessing may attend them to the further extension of His Kingdom.

Roslindale, Mass., April, 1917. H. C. M.

IN TUTELAGE

I

WESTWARD HO!

MY eyes first saw the light, June 20, 1847, in Belvidere, Illinois. It was a favored spot in the heart of that garden of the old Northwest lying between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River. It became settled seventy-five years ago by people representing some of America's best blood. Because of the circumscribed tillable areas farther East, these people migrated from New England, New York State, Pennsylvania and Ohio, into these great virgin tracts of the Mississippi Valley. The wondrous richness of those plains was simply awaiting the tickling of the ploughshare, the seed and the hoe, to "laugh with harvest.'' The large immigrations from North Europe and from the Celtic Isle, which in later years have so populated the country, were then less in evidence.

These original American immigrants were characterized by uncommon intelligence, enterprise, thrift and piety. But, while possessed of the best ideals of the East, they could no longer be content within the limits of their earlier habitat. They believed they could transplant their lives and their families into far better natural conditions.

My parents, and many other family relatives, were among the sturdy adventurers of that excellent company who set out upon this early quest. Among the celebrities of the town familiar to my childhood were many who had gained social and business standing elsewhere, and some were destined to distinction on wider fields. Some were Government agents for public lands. Some were bankers and money-lenders ; several soon became United States Congressmen. With the oncoming of the

2 15

Civil War, one, Hon. Allen C. Fuller, became Adjutant General of the State, and another, Hon. Stephen A. Hurlbut, a major-general of distinction in the army, both appointees of President Lincoln, while others became colonels and lesser officers. Some became judges of courts, successful teachers of schools, and adorned many professions.

And there were also brilliant women not a few, the full equal of their husbands. One of these aspired, perhaps with some hope, to becoming chief lady of the land in the White House. Moreover, such was the appreciation of culture in general that the rising town was at one time hopeful, among three or four rival towns in the Rock River Valley, of becoming the seat of the principal university of northern Illinois, afterwards located in Chicago, and now so richly endowed.

My father was one of the large contingent from western New York to settle in this region of the West. Although born in Delaware County, New York, he took his journey from Castile, Wyoming County, with his wife and a babe in arms, in a prairie schooner, around the south shores of Lake Erie and Michigan to the town above mentioned. Chicago, at that time planted on piles amid the ooze of the Calumet and Chicago River flats, had a population of about ten thousand souls. My father used to tell of passing along through deep mud on what is now Lake Street. At one spot in the street, from a pool a little more slimy than the rest, there projected a rail some three or four feet above the surface. On the top of this some wag had placed an old hat, and underneath it: "Caution! the horse and rider are both below."

In reference to pioneer days in Chicago, my father also loved to picture the primitive proprietor of the first Tremont House — Crouch by name — as he would receive a party of guests, sometimes arriving in a lumberwagon. Crouch would come running out of the tavern with a wood-bottomed chair to serve as a step, for the alighting of the party at the door, thus saving them from the mud while facilitating their descent. This is not ex-

WESTWARD HO!

actly the Chicago Hotel, "de luxe/' of the present day.

Beyond Chicago, in those days, were no railroads. The newly developing farming community eighty miles westward, of which my father was a member, in order to market their wheat, were obliged to haul it on wagons, and for long stretches, through a wet and miry country. And for the return trip the farmers would load with lumber for their primitive buildings and fences. To haul over the distance, going and coming, would consume a week or more for each trip. The farmers could only do this in groups, because their loaded wagons often would become stalled in quagmires, and teams needed to be "doubled up," or even quadrupled, in order to pull the loads out on to more solid ground.

As to railroads, my father and his elder brother were among the subcontractors to finish a section of one of the first roads west of Chicago — the one running through our town to Galena, on the Chicago & Northwestern line. It was rare sport for us youngsters to ride about on the "dump-boards" among the workmen with their many teams, or to court friendship with "Pat," the Hibernian, who brought the drinking-water for the men from the distant spring.

In half a dozen other communities in the same region of northern Illinois, many family relatives of both my parents had settled. What old-time intervisitations occurred between these families ! The children were commonly taken along and permitted closer acquaintance with their cousins. These visits generally occurred in the spring after crops were in, or in the autumn after the harvests were gathered, as James Whitcomb Riley

"When the frost is on the punkin And the fodder's in the shock."

And what dinners our mothers and aunts used to get up for our hungry palates — roast turkey, roast pig, chicken pies, fresh vegetables galore, mince pies, hickory and hazel nuts, popped corn, and all the other pristine dainties in which the growing child delights. I have only pity for the boy who has not grown up on a farm, with horses and colts to ride, with cattle and sheep to feed, and, in the long, crisp winters, the spelling-schools, sleighing parties, and, in summer, the running streams for fishing, not omitting the delights of the old "swimmin'-hole."

In this home of my youth I became practised in all forms of horsemanship, manual labor and endless choring. For two whole years I rode horseback from the home to the town school, summer and winter, daily, six miles each way, often "breaking" the young horses I rode, training them to a variety of paces, and laying in health and vigor for the tasks of the future. Everything I ever learned in that early farm apprenticeship from my sturdy yet sympathetic father, facing virgin conditions in soil, climate, surroundings or estate, has come in place in the years since, wherever I have wandered.

Moreover, in all those early years my mind was brooding over possible problems in life, resisting taunting suggestions from unbelieving neighbors. I recall how, noting differences between the sentiments they expressed and those which characterized my home folk even, for days together, while harrowing in the spring wheat or ploughing corn, barefooted, or listening to the cooing of the prairie chickens, I would reason out evidences for the truth of the Christian religion, answering objections to the cornstalks as so many imaginary skeptics. I was, from the beginning, "constitutionally a believer." I think the simplicity of life on that old farm, companion of my own thoughts, and of the very sheaves of grain I often pitched from the loaded wagon to my father laying them away in the stack, was my very best preparatory school, and a highly providential introduction to the experiences narrated further on.

Such was the type of life into the midst of which I was born in the new West. And ours was but one of many such communities athrob with the new civilization. There were others of similar type with which I came into touch in those childhood days in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.

WESTWARD HO!

Moreover, at the very front in the activities of the new time, there was a class of stalwart, pioneer preachers who put a lasting stamp on the religious, social and political life of all that region; these all had migrated from the older East. Among them were the pioneer Baptist pastor of the first church at old Fort Dearborn, Chicago (A. B. Freeman, a home missionary before my time, of our own society), Elisha Tucker, J. C. Burroughs, Robert Boyd (a flaming evangelist preacher from Stirling, Scotland), W. W. Everts, Justin A. Smith (for a generation editor of the Standard) , E. J. Goodspeed, Galusha Anderson (yet with us), and M. G. Hodge, of Janesville; A. J. Joslyn, of Elgin; Charles Button, of Aurora ; Ichabod Clark, of Rockford ; Luther Lawrence, preacher and statesman, often in the Illinois Legislature; D. E. Halteman, of Marengo; S. G. Miner, of Bloomington (friend of Abraham Lincoln) ; J. V. Schofield and William Crowell, of Freeport; James Dixon, of Milwaukee; Wm. M. Haigh, pastor and general home missionary; Henry G. Weston, of Peoria; and, not least among them all, the redoubtable old-time evangelist, Elder Knapp, of Rockford, of everywhere, from Boston to the Mississippi River and even the Pacific Coast. During his last days he was often an attendant on my own early ministry in Rockford. These men among the Baptists were real pioneers, in an era that can never come again in similar creative form in this broad land. I am grateful to have been brought into the world at such a time, and to have upon me the impress of such personalities.

II

THERE were a few outstanding influences most potent in my child life, of which I gratefully make mention. First of all was the very atmosphere of my own parental home. My parents, freshly come into a new country, it was plain, had not left their religion behind them, a circumstance for which I can never be too thankful. They were descended on both sides from a long line of godly progenitors. My father's traditional ancestry was through Holland from the French Huguenots. His immediate ancestors came through Dutchess, Delaware and Wyoming Counties, New York. My father's great-grandfather was a relict of the Revolutionary War, with a traditional record of having once escaped from some British warship by swimming several miles in the waters of Long Island Sound. My father's grandfather w r as a pioneer preacher, the first of a long line of Dutch Reformed people to become a Baptist. He had the distinction of supporting himself by brickmaking and coopering of barrels through the week, that he might on self-support preach the gospel on Sundays. From him, also, came down a heroic tradition, of the killing of a panther in the Catskills ; and these accounts often made my young blood tingle, as they were told out in winter evening tales to us children, by one or another of my father's aunts or uncles who had come into the country about the same time as my parents, and often sojourned with us.

In my father's immediate family there were seven brothers and two sisters, mostly of uncommonly large and stalwart physique, long inured to out-of-door life and to manual toil. My Grandfather Jacob, with his sturdy

HEISRY CLAY MABIE AS A BOY

OUT US IN Oi

■e a mild life

iigion

for which I can never be

ended on both sides from

itors. My father's tradi-

as through Holland from the French

: ate- ancestor ire and Wyoming Countie York.

.ad father was a relict : traditional record o e British warship : waters of Long Islan

; distil ing him brick-

ugh the ■

mdays.

a heroic, tradition, of the

ounts

aun wife,* had followed his son from New York State, to domicile with him. They drove the whole distance in a comfortable covered buggy. The father and son were the builders of the first framed house on the brow of a hill overlooking a famous stretch of land embracing several thousand acres, four miles from Belvidere, known as "Squaw Prairie," and which had been quickly pre-empted by the enterprising immigrant Easterners. My mother's ancestry — the Saxtons — were as noted for devotional characteristics as my father's. There were seven in the family group, of which my mother was a rarely gentle and amiable member. She did much of her ethical teaching through referring to her saintly father's habit of enforcing all sorts of genial and neighborly admonitions by certain wholesome maxims : "My father used to say so and so." He would often say, "If you can not speak something good of your neighbors, say nothing." That settled it for her. Nothing in the community's life more troubled my mother than the evil-speaking and small talk of the neighbors' doings in critical allusion, which go so far to create and foster ill-will when it is reported to the parties concerned, as it is sure to be. I think no lesson I learned in the home nest went further with me in subsequent days to forestall party differences in the churches I served, than the remembrance of these gentle references of my saintly mother. Nine-tenths of the strifes and divisions that vex the church are due to this mischievous tattle to the disparagement of others.

My mother's three brothers, Jacob, John and Asa, were also men of uncommon gifts and graces. John, in early life, was a sort of protege of the distinguished denominational leader and preacher, once of Buffalo and later of Chicago, Dr. Elisha Tucker, while a member of his church choir in Buffalo, before my uncle's migration to the West. For many years he was the most gifted deacon in our Belvidere Church; he had uncommon powers of expression respecting all things spiritual. His f elicitous and impressive phrases in prayer, whether

* One Polly Tallman.

at his own family altar, or in the church prayer-meetings, no one who ever heard, will forget. And when it came to the preparation of the annual church letter to the association, who like him could write it, and fill its every paragraph with the loftiest sentiment in Scripture phrase ? These letters were always uncommon. Two sisters of my mother, each in their turn, became wives of two most devoted men, in the diaconate of several churches served; one, R. T. Mabie, father of Dr. John S. Mabie, of California, and the other, Nathaniel Crosby, of Belvidere and Janesville, Wisconsin. Mrs, Crosby in a second marriage became the wife of the Rev. Cyrenius M. Fuller, a gifted minister known in the early Baptist annals of Vermont, once also a successful "agent" of the American Baptist Missionary Union, and later, in his advanced years, a most winsome occasional preacher in Illinois and Wisconsin. On this Saxton side of our family house there was an embodiment of the more delicate, aesthetic and refined qualities, while on my father's side the more virile, positive and heroic note was always in evidence.

Among the first deaths I ever witnessed, as a child, were those of both my grandmothers. My grandfathers I never saw, but the traditions of them that remained to their descendants were no doubt the chief and most valuable asset in the legacies left us. My father's father, although but a plain country deacon, was a man who impressed his fervor and religious zeal on all who knew him. He had a rare gift for friendship among his neighbors, and he so bore their spiritual interests on his great heart, that all his life he was a tactful soul-winner. He was a great believer in neighborhood prayer-meetings, and he himself was the central figure in them. Once in Chicago, when I was conversing with the late Mrs. D. Henry Sheldon, herself a woman of uncommon religious gifts, she suddenly inquired if I "ever saw my Grandfather Mabie." I answered "No," whereupon she said : "What a pity ! I saw him once, at my father's house [the Rev. Mr. Searle], when your grandfather and his wife were on their way from western Pennsylvania to Illinois, and I can never forget him. He was the only man I ever saw who, when he knelt to pray at family worship, took off his coat. As a child I wondered at it, but I ceased to wonder when he arose, for he was as wet with perspiration as if he had been dipped in the river!" I later repeated this account to my revered friend, Dr. Aaron H. Burlingham, in New York, whereupon the old veteran, with choking emotion, responded: "I have seen the old man scores of times take off his coat when he prayed in the old Portage schoolhouse prayer-meetings." It was in this very neighborhood that several of the Burlingham family, of a half-dozen or more members, were, through the old deacon's agency, led to Christ. A child bred amidst such family traditions as these would be obdurate indeed not to respond early to the claims of religion so earnestly, sanely and yet genially commended.

Another influence very deeply felt by me was the stock of neighborhood and religious traditions my parents had brought with them from the loved and revered "York State" home. It was to influences in Castile and Portage, and the region surrounding the picturesque Genesee Falls, that my parents always felt they owed so much. There they were schooled; there they were both converted, baptized and married by one Rev. James Reed, a man who held the pastorate in Castile for twenty-five consecutive years, and whose deep religious personality and typical convictions became impressed on a large community. Then there were scattered round about that section of western New York, other ministers also deeply revered in Castile. Among these were Elon Galusha, Harrison Daniels, H. K. Stimson (of the early "stage-coach" fame), Ichabod Clark, Hosea Fuller and Rev. Wm. Arthur, father of Chester A. Arthur, who later came to the Presidency of the nation. Under Mr. Arthur my father was converted, during a meeting held in the town of Perry, near Silver Lake. Some of these men betimes came on visits to the great West, and very often they and other "down East neighbors" became guests at my father's house; and their table-talk often filled with interest the shy lad whom they probably never suspected of taking notice. Ah! ye lares and penates of that old farmhouse home! how little ye knew of the worshipful attention ye there commanded, and of the philosophies ye were instilling into a silent mind more attentive and reverent than ye dreamed!

On one occasion the famous colporter, Uncle John Vassar, put up at our "minister's tavern." He preferred to curl up for a night's sleep on a rug before an open fire on the hearth rather than occupy the best feather bed in the spare chamber. A picture, or a little book sometimes left behind, would stamp its lesson indelibly upon the infant mind. Here it was I found the home school more impressive, in its way, than many another more ambitious one I have since enjoyed. There enduring foundations were laid for faith in God, and in his purposes for all mankind.

It was in connection with one of the old-time visits, that my parents so loved to make to their former York State friends, yet living over the line in southern Wisconsin, that occurred one of those childhood incidents that, early and ineffaceably impressed my moral and religious nature. At the time I was less than four years old. The morning my parents drove away on their visit a hundred miles distant, my older sister, nine years of age, took me with her for sisterly care to the country log schoolhouse, a mile and a half from home. The school hours passed, we started to wend our way homeward. As we trudged on, suddenly a cyclonic thunder-storm arose. Neighbors whom we met, besought us to turn in with them until the storm-clouds passed. But my sister bravely said: "No, my mother charged me to come directly home with my little brother, and I am not afraid of the rain." As we walked rapidly on, we met two farmer neighbors running from a cornfield, hoes in hand, to a place of shelter; they also pleaded that we children should go with them. "No," replied my sister, and we hurried on. She removed her sun-bonnet to save it from the drops now falling fast. I began to cry from fear, but she comforted me with assurances of

God's care, in which she so implicitly trusted. Then the rain came in torrents. We were passing through an open gateway between two fields, yet a half-mile from home, when suddenly there came a bolt direct — a bolt which shivered the two gateposts to splinters, and my dear sister, who was carrying her bright tin dinner-pail upon her arm, an easy conductor for the lightning, fell, and I, supposedly, with her, except that, as I fell, the Providence that had taken her saw that I should fall into a rivulet of running water that ran beside the way. This apparently revived me. Yet for months afterward there remained stamped upon my body two black marks of the deadly lightning. Anxious relatives and neighbors, concerned the more for us that our parents were known to have left home that morning, soon found me bewildered in the storm, and cared for me and the body of my brave, dead sister.*

Of course my parents were instantly followed by a messenger, and called immediately home to face the most biting sorrow of their lives. I have but dim memories of the pathetic funeral, and that of a younger sister who died later with seraphic songs upon her lips, but the effect I suppose of the oft-recited tragedies in our lonely home, and the incidental moralizings therefrom, led me more and more to conclude that there was a divine purpose in my preservation, especially in the very moment of my older sister's removal. At all events, I have long believed that just as certainly as a similar experience in the youth of Martin Luther impressed him as singled out for some divine purpose worth while, so surely was T then called out of heaven to witness earnestly in His name — a "heavenly vision," to which I have ever felt charged to be "not disobedient." Even through a cataclysm like this, so peculiarly afflictive to my dear parents, I have long been able to trace, as did they also, how

*Among these was a warm friend of my parents, a Mrs. Chester Carpenter, mother of a line of several worthy sons, who have since risen to Christian and business distinction in Omaha and other Western cities. Until her recent decease Mrs. Carpenter's interest in my life-history was scarcely less than that in one of her own sons.

"Behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face."

Another of the impressive incidents of my early childhood occurred in connection with a public missionary meeting to which my mother was wise and motherly enough to take me, when I could not have been more than four years old. She took me even though she knew I would probably curl up and sleep on her lap throughout the meeting, as I did. I remember a few things about that meeting, and chiefly this, that it is worth while to take young children to such meetings, even though they can not take in a sentence of what is said, and though the child sleeps throughout. When it awakes, it may see more in a minute than its elders have seen in an hour and a half. This is what I saw after my mother wakened me. The speaker was a tall, swarthy man, a medical missionary from the Hawaiian Islands, whose name was Judd, later a counselor of large influence to native princes in the islands. A hymn was sung; then a contribution-plate was passed round. When that plate came to my mother, I saw her slip a ring off her finger, and lay it on the plate in lieu of a little money not just then by her, and then observed that she wiped some hot tears from her gentle eyes. Then I knew that some great thing was going on, or my mother wouldn't do that. That ring was made from gold mined in California by two of her brothers, and given to a favorite sister-inlaw. Shortly before this, I had seen this aunt of mine, on her dying-bed, give this keepsake to my mother; and with it a baby daughter but a few months old to be taken to our desolate home, to become a sister to me in place of the ones the Lord had caught away to the skies.

The ring, therefore, was a precious memento to her. The baby cousin lived but a few weeks in our home, and then it also went — our little Lilian — to be with my two sisters, a deceased infant brother and the angels in the glory-land. Tell me that a child doesn't know what is going on amid scenes like those? Oh, how I suffered in the thought that no child except poor me could live long in my mother's house! When, therefore, in the light of that child heartache, I saw my mother's self-denying act, I knew something uncommon had occurred in her soul. Moreover, it was doubtless out of such a child-experience that there arose in my heart and imagination embryonic but real ideals, concerning Christian missions. These, however sacrificial — nay, because they are necessarily sacrificial — have been controlling with me ever since. Can the reader imagine the satisfaction with which, when I found myself in Honolulu a half -century or more later, on the first occasion en route to the Morrison Centenary Conference in Shanghai in 1907, and again, a second time, in returning from my last world tour in 1914, with my wife, I made special pilgrimages to the pretty cemetery amid the royal palms, to pay a heartfelt tribute to the memory of Dr. Judd, so centrally associated is his name with the deepest and most Christian passions of my soul? That which is most moving to me is the thought that the eternal God so condescended to link an infant mind with such worthies of the past and with the very deepest movements of all history, and of the timeless order. Oh, my soul! let me to the very end come more and more into their great secret.