The education of Ernest Wilmerding; a story of opening flowers

Front matter

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Epilogue

. 260

THE EDUCATION OF ERNEST WILMERDING

The Education of Ernest Wilmerding

CHAPTER I

The Reverend John Dodson

The Reverend John Dodson, aged about forty, was, in the late seventies of the nineteenth century, the pastor of a strug¬ gling Baptist church in the frontier town of San Antonio, Texas. Dodson had no personal ambition to be the leader of a spiritual flock housing itself within a monumental pile of brick and mortar, or to bathe himself in the flooding sunshine streaming within the holy sanctuary through expensive win¬ dows of glass which stained the outlines of the saints and martyrs of the early ages of the Christian church. Quite con¬ tented was he to administer, in a compassionate way, to a handful of humble folk who gathered at his simple sanctuary— an old frame church—on several occasions during the week to break the bread of Christ together, and learn the lessons of meekness and sobriety falling in accents of great earnestness from the respected pastor’s lips.

Dodson cared little for the world and its affairs. Attired in a suit of uncertain vintage, but black in color and clerical in cut, with a high collar and tie of a white bow—all sur¬ mounted by his auburn sideburns and auburn hair, with the proper final fitting of a stovepipe hat, more or less in polish from an occasional application along the elbow, he grimly fought the fight, conscious of the direct and personal agency of Almighty God, who kept the Reverend in the hollow of His hand and considered him as one of the army of Abraham to make all things ready as against that day of eternal reckoning, which was the assured destiny of the human race.

There is no disturbance of the peace of soul to such as he. Each day unwinds itself forth without problems, or a desire to create them. At the finality of the religious service each

Sabbath evening he would look calmly forward to an unevent¬ ful week, warmed by the consciousness of having performed his part in the spiritual advancement of the Cause of his Mas¬ ter, the Lord Jesus Christ. The orientation of his life was toward the Sabbath ending, and at this culmination there streamed forth the blazing light of God’s love that showed him the open pathway of the week to come.

Away back in the Egyptian days this orientation of the temples served to fix the certainty of coming events. As the time of the Spring equinox approached, the rising sun would penetrate the narrow opening of the temple to irradiate the face of the god above the altar and thus tell the waiting multi¬ tude that Spring had come. So the mellowness of his heart, in the final benediction at the Sabbath’s close, whispered its words of a coming peace for the week to our servant of the Most High. Yes, the old sphinx had faced the East for all the uncounted centuries and so would he, just as immovable, just as supremely oblivious to the sweep of the desert sands of life that were the creations of every blowing wind, be con¬ fident of the final harbor in which he would find his eternal rest and reward.

To how many, enwrapt in the affairs of a busy existence, can this peace of mind come, a peace without understanding, but yet the inheritance of the divinely consecrated Son of God, satisfied to act at the behest of a Master who is daily breathing into his life the message of a holy wish. What strange and crude vessels are the conveyors of the word of God. No one, to have met Reverend John Dodson would have suspected that he was like the old ark of the Covenant, the holder of the secrets of the Most High, yet within, his demeanor was of a man of the pronounced conviction of a high purpose that had devolved upon him to give service to, and when he solemnly invoked the benediction at the close of his sermon each Sunday night—“and now may the blessing of Almighty God go with you, and each of you, through the following days of the week until we shall gather again in the House of Prayer”—one could but feel impressively the presence of an unknown power which gave the healing balm of a peace content. Thus the weeks of the years came and went. No other ambition seemed to stir in his breast; no greater call from on High to seek other pastures.

His modicum of knowledge was sufficient for his daily ministrations, and while he might have thought to himself: Here, Master, take me and use me as thou wilt; if there are other fields to which I may become the shepherd; other vine¬ yards where I can gather the fruits after the patient toil of cultivation, still I am here content, filling the little niche in the plan of a Master whose humble servant I forever am. If he was ever reminded of the old carreta, drawn by the patient untiring oxen in the pueblos of the newer Spain, into whose faces the frontier town of San Antonio looked from the win¬ dows of the Franciscan missions, he never expressed himself in words of restless dissatisfaction at the slow pace with which everything traveled. Why stir up oneself with new thoughts or larger ideas—the very suggestion would be like the whispers of the evil one who must not be entertained. Was he not doing the work of the Master well?—his inner conscience told him that. Very well, he would carry on, and await events, and he felt his ability to surmount any circumstances which might arise.

One day, following his frequent custom, he took his bible and walked to San Pedro Park, where he could sit quietly and watch the flowing river with its wriggling snakes and sunning turtles, to think out from the stores in the Testaments the thoughts he would bring to his people the coming Sunday. Musing thus and ejaculating aloud as an occasional argument of effectiveness suggested itself, he attracted the interest of a well-dressed, middle-aged man who was sitting on the bench beside him, engrossed in drinking in the soft Winter air of the late January day and feeling the lazy impulse of an idle hour, where he could enjoy its carefreeness in the warming rays of the Texas sunshine. A stranger, evidently from his dress, and an occasional glance at a Louisville paper which he held in his hand, he was probably the traveling representative of some commercial house in that city which dispensed its wares in the southern territories. While he might have been, from the smart cut of his clothes and general neatness, a commercial traveler pure and simple, there was still an added atmosphere of culture and refinement which betokened the man of a larger world than was reckoning only with the problems of sales and profits. To such a one, a man absorbed in a book, even though that book was the bible, an interest was excited and especially as there was plenty of leisure and soft air and sunshine per¬ vading, a stimulus to conversation was aroused which could not be withheld.

Dodson’s emotional lips were trembling with the excite¬ ment a text had instigated, and upon his giving an unusual explosive ejaculation to his inward eloquence, the stranger turned to him inquiringly, as if to be allowed to become a part of the interesting experience going on within the Reverend’s auburn-crowned head.

“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness even so must the Son of Man be lifted up. Yes, yes, even so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” The tears were streaming down his face as he repeated the words again and again, and finally turning to the stranger beside him in the seat, he realized his sense of fellowship with one whose pres¬ ence he had not been before aware of, and in a broken voice he said: “Pardon my emotion, sir, I did not think but that I was alone and unnoticed. These urgings of the Spirit come upon me like an irresistible flood, and I give way to them in the immensity of the thrill of joy which they bring with them. I do not know, sir, if you are of an emotional nature, but if you are, you can enter into these feelings with me; and if not, I can assure you that the life of peace is not fully accomplished without the great propelling currents of the heart which well to the surface and compel one to express audibly what bursts from within and must find their satisfaction in outward expres¬ sion. As you have observed, I am a clergyman, and the Word of God is a well-spring from on high to which I go for refresh¬ ment and understanding.”

“Permit me, sir, to express my admiration for your sin¬ cerity of purpose and expression,” the stranger said, “for how¬ ever widely I may differ from another in the conclusions he shall have arrived at, I am always willing to acknowledge the great latitude there is in human thinking, and how often, though in most opposite ways, we travel to the same terminal. My edu¬ cation has been probably as widely different from yours as any could possibly be, but the strength of any education lies in the acknowledgment of the fact that definite conclusions are diffi¬ cult to arrive at, and even then seem to be subject to the vary¬ ing moods of passing time, as it reflects itself in the great mass of thinking that continuously goes on everywhere. Thus it is we find the different systems of thought and philosophy preva¬ lent and accepted in various parts of the world, and the actions of individuals grouped together in certain localities or in different latitudes, are alike within themselves but entirely dif¬ ferent to peoples of other nations and other climes. It is so with me. My early years, until I was twenty, were spent in my native city of Louisville, where I absorbed the thought and customs of old Kentucky. My family was to ‘the manor born/ inheriting the traditions of a number of generations of good manners and breeding and of recognized culture and position in society. After the beginning of the war between the North and the South, at the time I was twenty-two years old and had finished my home education, I was sent abroad to secure that old world touch of a cosmopolitanism which gave me a refine¬ ment in the study of Art and Philosophy I could not otherwise get. I spent several years at the University of Bonn in Ger¬ many, and there absorbed not only the prevalent ideas of Ger¬ man philosophy, which were then world recognized as being authoritative, but found the influence of such English scientists as Charles Darwin was becoming quite extensive in all of the European centres of learning.

“Science had long been approaching the point of unifying in a general system the ideas that were working to a demon¬ stration of important theories like the descent of man, and the survival of the fittest. It needed only some one brain with a sufficient power of classification to take the several threads of the theory and put them together concretely, where they could exist as an independent factor in the thought of the world and be developed through the application of study and enlargement. Of course, you being a graduate of a theological school know the controversy which followed in all of the Christian coun¬ tries of the world. It seemed to most people that the system of thinking and belief which had existed for ages and had been the governing influence in the lives of countless millions was about to be ruthlessly overthrown and a coldly philosophic theory put in its place.

“I can never forget the shock that came to me, as an impressionable young man who had been an assiduous attend¬ ant at the Episcopal Church and had never an occasion to question the religious doctrines which it represents. Of course, I was at Bonn in an atmosphere of scepticism and inquiry, where new ideas, even to undermine the foundations of belief in any subject, were sought for and welcomed if clothed with the semblance of a truth that, emanating from recognized cen¬ tres. German philosophers were profound thinkers, and their grundlichkeit was an accepted conclusion in all scholarly cir¬ cles. After all, had not the old theologic conceptions of the cosmic world, as related to a harmonious relationship with miraculous religion, been rudely disturbed several times by such men as Copernicus, Galileo, and even as late as the time of living men who were influenced by the thought of Goethe, Kant and David Friedrich Strauss, whose Das Leben Jesu had attracted the attention of the intellectual world in its effective attack on the miracle in Christianity.

“But pardon me, sir, I am perhaps speaking too boldly to one who is a stranger, and it may be what I say disturbs your peace of mind, inasmuch as I take it you are at present much absorbed in the study of your bible and perhaps are preparing thoughts for a coming sermon. I should have been more con¬ siderate in putting my personal experiences forward, especially as they must be of a nature that will arouse some feelings of opposition and discontent. At any rate I feel that I have already trespassed on your attention, but I should be very glad to see you again and to know you better. We can all learn from each other, and I should be interested to have your reac¬ tion to the things I have been constrained to speak to you about. I shall be in San Antonio during the month of February and am stopping at the Menger Hotel, where I shall be very glad to have you call upon me. Perhaps there are phases of your life and work here which would give me another and a broader viewpoint. As it is, I feel kindly toward any cause that is one of enthusiasm. Music, Art and Religion, if cold and colorless, have no attraction for my nature, but I respond to the one who has a Cause of which he can be eloquent, and this is what attracted me to you when I sat here on the bench and saw the tears run down your face as you repeated the old text: ‘Even as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.’ It reminds me of the old saying of Rousseau: ‘Socrates died like a philosopher, but Jesus Christ like a God’—the difference in temperament that brings color and movement to all the things in life and makes them virile and real. Here is my card—Thomas J. Breckin¬ ridge is my name—the J is for Jefferson—and I am by occupa¬ tion an attorney and counsellor-at-law, so you will see I have a name and an avocation to live up to, and I mean to do it.”

Reverend Dodson could not say much in reply—he was outclassed to be sure, but his native fortitude and resolution quickly came to the rescue as he offered his hand to Breckin¬ ridge, and in the strong resonant tones of the practical speaker and leader, said: “My dear sir, you also interest me; it is not often that I have the privilege of meeting men of your position in life, possessing the broad experience in world affairs that you evidently have. I think I feel the call of God to make some answer to the things that have influenced you in your life, and I shall be glad indeed to accept your invitation to call at your hotel and consider the subject further. In the mean¬ while if you would be interested to attend the service at the Baptist Church next Sunday, I shall be glad to see you, as I may draw some lessons, very vivid to me, touching on the necessity of the death on the cross. I wish you good day, sir.” ♦ *

The next Sunday morning the Reverend John Dodson bestirred himself early. His face was grimly set in a deter¬ mination to be relieved of a multitude of rushing thoughts which had crossed and recrossed themselves in his mind since the experience with the stranger in San Pedro Park. Of course he would preach in the evening, as had been his inten¬ tion, on the text of the lifted cross, that whosoever looked and believed should not perish but have everlasting life; but the subject of the morning was not to him so clear. The moving of the spirit within had always suggested the timely subject upon which he was to elucidate a text, and after carefully examining his concordance, the striking events of the XVII

Chapter of Luke seemed to answer to the immediate needs of having something on his mind that he would like to formulate into a human utterance for the edification of his flock. The great bell in the Franciscan Church—San Fernando’s Cathe¬ dral—had started its labors before the sun was up, calling the faithful of its kind to masses of different degrees, and when Dodson heard the stirring peal of this bell he could no longer rest, but was up betimes and roused his household to action.

He had resolved to preach from the lessons of the afore¬ said chapter and use the xviii verse as the pivot on which to swing his batteries of clinching arguments. “Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.” Here was a ham¬ mer he could use on Darwin, and Kant, and Strauss and Goethe, and even on Thomas J. Breckinridge if he was within hearing, and he proposed with all the vehemence of his ardent nature to preach the gospel on that Sabbath day with no uncer¬ tain accent.

He arose from his bed with a great exhibition of muscular energy—slipped into his Sunday best with many quick and decisive jerks of the fingers and arms, paced up and down the room while he fitted buttons with buttonholes, stood before his glass with protruding tongue, when his clean white bow was obstreperous, and behaved generally like a man bound on a great voyage of determination. At one unfortunate juncture the refractory collar button refused to adapt itself to its double duty of holding the two ends of the collar in place and delib¬ erately slipped away from his nervous fingers and found lodg¬ ment in a very secretive place away beyond his reach, at the furtherest distance from the edge of the bureau upon which his mirror rested. Down upon the floor he went his full length, upon his back, stretching to his uttermost to reach the rebel button which he espied far away and against the wall to which his bureau backed. Very red in the face and much out of breath, he was yet eloquent with his text of the morning, as he triumphantly emerged once again with the captive collar but¬ ton, saying, as though to it: “Except as a little child—shall they in no wise enter therein.” “I’ll show them, these for¬ eigners, who come between my Christ and the people.”

Of course, he rang his own church bell, there was no money for a sexton, and the seats went undusted from week to week, save as sat on and leaned back against by the faithful parishioners whose walks in life did not admonish them to flick off the dust that might have gathered during the week. How the Reverend John pulled the bell-rope that Sunday morning—it was like a rallying cry for the faithful to come to an attack on the evil one. Every time he pulled, the words of the text arose vividly before his eyes: “Whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.” There was no ambiguity in these words— they fell clear and strong and resonant as the bell above him that was as audibly spreading the message of his mind as he could have done himself. Each stroke of the bell was a word of the text, and he made as many strokes as there were sylla¬ bles so that the whole city of twenty thousand souls should know that there was a message to be delivered and that he, the Reverend John Dodson, was the executor of Christ from on high to deliver it.

After the bell-ringing, during the half hour before the begin¬ ning of the service, it was his habit to go into the little room in the basement of the church, which he dignified with the name of the pastor’s study, and there go over the chief points of his sermon and engage himself in earnest prayer for words of conviction to drive the message to the hearts of his hearers. Getting down on his knees, his bible clasped within his hands, he poured forth his soul in intimate pleadings to the One, who to him, was sitting on an eternal throne above, in image like himself, with ear ready and willing to listen to his impassioned pleas for a divine inspiration. At first, in low pleading tones he touched the strings of his emotions, too gently perhaps, but—the mounting tide of his enthusiasm arose almost to an ecstasy, like the fury of an increasing storm. The psychology of all this was that when he afterward entered the pulpit his mind was awakened and on the alert, and his thoughts flowed like a river from his unloosened tongue, which seemed touched with live coals from off the altars of divinity.

“O Thou great and almighty God,” he prayed, “omnipo¬ tent, omniscient and omnipresent—Alpha and Omega, divine Creator of the Universe, before whom I, as a humble servant bow in the humility of sackcloth and ashes, the least of Thy servitors, yet ardent in the spirit and a willing bearer of the message of the Most High to a despairing and hopeless humanity, hopeless save as Thou canst reach out Thy helping hand and lift it up to stand once more on the firm foundation of a faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. I beseech Thee the favor of Thy gracious presence with us this morning as I present the broken body and the shed blood to my people—may they not forget the vicarious suffering of Thine only begotten Son on the cross that they might not perish but have everlasting life. Thou, Jehovah, God and Father of the chosen people of Israel, the same yesterday, today and forever, incline Thine ear to us— full of iniquity and short-comings as we are, yet in a humble and contrite spirit we approach the great throne of Thy right¬ eousness and to beg that Thou wilt overlook our sins of omis¬ sion and commission, and breathe anew in us the spirit of uplift from our unworthiness, that we may feel the kinship of brotherhood with Thy Son, our Savior and Redeemer, Jesus Christ.”

(Movements are heard above as though the choir is about to start the service—the little melodeon sounding the prelim¬ inary notes to the Choral. This hurried the Reverend John somewhat in his devotions, and with the final words: “All of which I humbly ask in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” he arose to his feet and made his way to the pulpit as the choir was standing in its place singing the opening piece.) To those who noticed at all, the minister seemed to be in an unusually ardent and earnest frame of mind and uneasily shifted about during the singing, as though anxious to have his part in the service begin. In fact, he had emotionally worked himself into a fever heat of religious ecstasy in which he saw vividly portrayed all the sufferings of Gethsemane. The agony on the Mount of Olives was very real to him and he felt the indignation of a personal affront, as though someone very near and dear to him was the direct object of an overpowering brutality. This was realism set to music, and it charmed him in its intensity as though some strange hypnotic influence was round about which he could not, and indeed did not wish to withstand—it was all too sweet to his soul, like some exotic fragrance that brought with it a profound languor of satis¬ faction.

Within himself he knew that all this superabundance of mind-fulmination was a reaction to the words of the cultured stranger with whom he had so unexpectedly conversed while sitting on the bench in San Pedro Park. He had not at the time comprehended the stirring value of the new thoughts which the stranger had brought to him, of an essentially antag¬ onistic nature to be sure, but he now realized the danger with which such suggestions would confront the old systems of theology. There was a comfortable feeling with the allure¬ ments of the old religious ideas. St. Paul’s words were such an intimate association in his life and with all who were faith¬ fully devoted to the precepts of his different epistles. Certainly his was a religion of devout humility: “God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” were remarkable words to proceed from the new convictions of a lawyer who had been an ardent persecutor of the latest sect. With this spirit of humility it seemed that nothing could make any serious headway against the system of Christianity, but could it be possible that the new philosophy of critical scholarship would find humility vulnerable as the doctrine of life? Dodson thought not, and yet there was that little seed of scepticism, planted in his mind by the recent conversation, that had given him a touch of the fever of doubt which reacted upon his combative nature and forced him unconsciously to take up, in a vociferous way, the cudgels of arguments in Christianity’s defense.

This he was determined now to do—here was his great opportunity to keep his own people safe and warn them of any untoward steps toward imbibing unsettling ideas—it is not probable they would—they were not the kind who worried much about new thoughts, the old were good enough for them and had served their progenitors away back as far as they cared to remember. All they needed was a religion to die by, life in itself was but a transmission and did not particularly concern them excepting they knew they had to live in order to die, but dying was the main thing because it was the exit to eternal blessedness, which consisted mainly in a conception of an endless harmony of existence without work, and work to them was a drudgery which they only endured because there seemed to be no other way. They had heard of more favored ones, who got along by letting others shoulder the burdens, but they were a far away people who only came to them through the hearsay of some of the gossips who liked to retail stories about the doings of the big-wigs that floated to them in a hazy sort of mist, like the fairy tales of childhood.

All these thoughts rushed through his fevered mind like an express train while he waited for the choir to finish, and he also glanced eagerly through his audience to see if perchance Thomas J. Breckinridge was among those present. In this he was disappointed, but it did not affect him one way or the other very much, for he had determined to call upon him at his hotel very shortly and have an earnest conversation with him about the spiritual life. He knew he would be the better prepared for it after thinking the problems out alone to his congregation, in a sermon which would have a settling influence on his own mind by hearing his voice declaim the convincing facts of the gospels themselves.

“Brethren, the text I bring to you this Sabbath morning will be found in the seventeenth chapter of the gospel accord¬ ing to St. Luke, at the eighteenth verse: ‘Verily, I say unto you whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.’ This seventeenth chapter of Luke is one of the deeply profitable mines of the New Testament. It teaches largely the simplicity and humility of the Christian religion. No one who earnestly and honestly seeks to know what this religion is can fail to find it fully set forth in this most illuminating chapter. The contrast of the pharisee and publican, the childishness of the wise and the wisdom of the simple, the futility of riches, all go to make up in a few sentences the cardinal features of our religion. It has always taken its scoffers unawares because of its sim¬ plicity; it has perplexed the learned and scholarly at all times from the fact that it has no mysteries or problems to be solved. Those golden words: ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved/ were so direct and unostentatious that the Pharisaical class was bound to ridicule the whole scheme as visionary, and fit only for the ignorant and slaves. As long as God reinforced his words by miracles there could be no ques¬ tion of the ultimate success of the program, and it was so indeed that Christianity spread rapidly throughout the western world and became its Master. After a while it grew to such power that miracles were not considered necessary and the church held its own through the gathered force of the cen¬ turies, in which it had been the stabilizing factor in the lives of nations as well as individuals. So the miraculous receded into the distance of long years past, but the belief in them was as ardent as when they were realities in the eyes of the multi¬ tudes. Today, some, who know not what they do, are striving to emasculate and devitalize our religion by saying that miracles are and were impossible and only the fantastic ‘imaginings of the ignorant and superstitious.’