The eternal building; or, The making of manhood

Front matter

MWMM

Chap. _.__]£ copyright So.__.

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Chapter IV. The Dome And Its Wonders

The Need of Large Brains, The Brain an Inheritor, The Mind and the Truth, The Quest of Truth, .

Why Start with God? .

Will Power,

The Crown of Self-mastery, Tact, ....

157 161 168

173 178 184 194 204 212

Chapter V. The Temple Within The Dome

The Superintendent of Construction, . . . . 231

The Great Affirmation, . . . . . 261

Chapter VI. The Wonderful Tenant Of The Building

Index 373

List of Portraits.

William Ewart Gladstone Frontispiece

George Washington facing page 20

Galileo

Martin Luther

James Abram Garfield

Charles Lamb

Frances E. Willard

Napoleon Bonaparte

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Sir Walter Scott

Christopher Columbus

Nikola Tesla

Immanuel Kant

Otto Von Bismarck

John James Audubon

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Abraham Lincoln

William Lloyd Garrison

James Russell Lowell

Florence Nightingale

John Wesley

George Mliller

23 32 58 83 88 114 127

152 164

THE DISCOVERY OF THE BUILDING.

I AM more than a life. I am the somewhat who has life. — Thorndale.

When God created man — his last and best work — this was as if a king, having built a great city and adorned it with many and various works, after he had perfected all should command a very great and beautiful image of himself to be set up in the midst of the city, to show who was the builder of it. — Theodorus Mopsuestenus.

The meaning of creation is not understood till dust stands erect in a living man. That a great purpose was present from the beginning, directing and controlling, there can be no doubt. It presided over the first nebulous mist that floated out to take form in the foundations of the earth. It measured and weighed the matter and force necessary to form the globe. It determined the elements required to do the work lying through the years before it. It assigned to them their laws, specific gravities and affinities, and appointed, beforehand, the combinations and collocations they were capable of making.

But not till the atoms throbbed in a human brain and beat in a human heart did the purpose which had through the ages run stand out defined and justified. Then it was that the intention underneath the drift of the ages spelled itself out in the unity of thought, the freedom of choice, and the capacity for love, potential in the intellect, will, and heart of the first man. He was the realization of an ideal, which gave meaning to the long periods of preparation. As the final expression of the creative process he was at once the interpreter and the interpretation of all that had gone before.— James W. Lee, D.D., The Makiiig of a Man.

Chapter I. The Discovery Of The Building

The Builder of Palaces.

MAN is a builder. If the evolutionary hypothesis is true, that ape, what-is-it ? missing link, pre-Adamite, who first uncurled his tail from the limb of the tree from which his ancestors had for eons been content to swing themselves, and set himself to build of bough and clay and moss and stone a tiny dwelling into which he could run out of the wet, must have been the first man, or, rather, this act was the sign that apedom was ended and mandom begun. The sign still testifies. The ape still swings from tree to tree and dwells amid their branches; man, even of the lowest orders — African pygmies, Australian bushmen, Patagonian earth-eaters, Eskimo seal hunters — rears some sort of a roof for his covering and contrives some sort of a pillow for his head.

With the question when and whence man came we have nothing now to do, save to express our belief that when he came, he came with the breath of God within him, and came when the purpose of God would be the best conserved by his advent, and in such a manner as best fitted him to rear for God on earth a race that would do his will.

It is with man in the world we have to do. Man is the

interpretation of nature. The purpose of creation was an enigma until man rose up out of the dust with the image of the Eternal upon him and the breath of the Divine dilating his nostrils. Then nature knew its mission — it was to be the servant of the crown of God's creative work. From the days of Adam until now men have been builders. In Eden's garden the first pair may have been content with some sylvan dell, but once out in the world and the contest for the continuance of his supremacy over nature pressed upon him, man has built and built, until the world is crowded with the work of his hand and brain. Tents and temples, barns and bungalows, cottages and cathedrals, mansions and mosques, palaces and pyramids, shrines and synagogues, kraals and kiosks, harbors and lighthouses, canals and railroads, have sprung from his magic touch, and still he builds.

Every great race that has been dominant in the earth, or even the master of a fraction of the globe, has left its architectural monuments to arouse the curiosity or admiration of succeeding peoples. To build and to build something that would endure has been the passion of the masters of every great state in all ages. From the earliest days of which we have historic record, when from the banks of the Nile the shouts of the builders of the pyramids rang in the air, down to that day when to the music of a thousand bands and the marching tread of a parading army and the echoing plaudits of a numberless multitude the monument to the American hero was unveiled on the banks of the Hudson, men have been rearing wood and granite, marble and precious stones, in glorious piles, to witness to future ages the fact that they have lived and wrought in this world of change.

When Father Abraham stood before Pharaoh some of the pyramids which are still the wonder of the builders of the world cast their shadow on him. Perhaps the very obelisk that now points to the sky in our metropolitan

The Builder of Palaces. 13

city was before his eye. When Moses with his host journeyed forth toward the promised land they filed down the avenue of the pyramids and looked into the stony face of the Sphinx. When Solomon awed the world by the splendor of Jehovah's peerless temple its fame spread far and fast because it so far outshone the glorious architectural creations of the past. Even then China had thrown her vast wall across her northern frontier, and her earlier temples of the sun lifted their fanes to catch its radiance; Mexico had laid the foundations for those glorious piles that culminated in the palaces of the Montezumas, and the eternal snows of the Peruvian Andes looked down on the stately beginnings of the splendors of the Incas.

When Daniel reached Babylon he found those mighty walls which for a century defied the Medes and Persians. He breathed the perfume of that wonder of the world — her hanging garden — and though the eyes of his soul looked on no temple but the one in ruin at Jerusalem, those of his body could look in no direction without beholding the shadow of Great Bel. Jonah and Nahum walked through avenues of grandeur, and their voices echoed from palace to palace and temple to temple when they preached of judgment to come in Nineveh, " that exceeding great city. " Had any queen in history so beautiful a home as the palace Esther the Beautiful entered at Susa ? Even the eloquent diction of Homer failed him when he would describe the circling walls, and hundred gates, and pillared avenues, and sculptured regal residences men had reared at Thebes.

Then as we approach the life of the cities and peoples whose history is more completely written for our study, how the monuments of man's building spring up before us! Greece presents to our eyes the splendors of her majestic creations. Through the eyes of Demosthenes and Paul we look from Mars Hill upon the aggregated glories of the Agora and its statues of the gods, the Acropolis and its

Temple of the Wingless Victory, and the bronze Colossus of Minerva. Ephesus has her temple to Diana, and Antioch her vast amphitheater, in which we have raced in the chariot of Ben-Hur. Then we follow the march of empire, and Rome with all its palaces of the Caesars, its Coliseum and Pantheon, Forum and baths of the emperors, is before us. Then Christianity bursts out on the world; Rome wins St. Peter's; London, St. Paul's; Paris, Notre Dame; Venice, St. Mark's; Florence, Santa Maria; Antwerp, Canterbury, Cologne, Milan, Rheims, Seville, Strasburg, and a host of other cities, their magnificent and famous cathedrals, and no city, town, or hamlet is content until a spire lifts its cross toward the heavens.

How much, also, of the story of every nation's life is treasured in its great buildings. At the mention of their names the history of centuries flashes out upon the screen. Thus England has her Bridge and Tower, Parliament Buildings and Westminster Abbey; Scotland, her Castles of Holyrood and Stirling; France, her Tuileries and Louvre, Bastile and Hotel des Invalides; Russia, the Kremlin; Spain, the Alhambra and Escurial; Venice, the Palace of the Doges; Copenhagen, the Blue Tower; Constantinople, St. Sophia. Even America, young as she is, has her historic buildings. The modest brick hall of Peter Faneuil is cherished as the ' 'Cradle of Liberty ; " Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, is the mecca of patriotic youth. Mount Vernon and Monticello are names indissolubly linked with the story of our greatness, while the Capitol with its soaring dome and the palatial libraries at Boston, Chicago, and Washington foretell the triumphs of our architects.

In works of utility what triumphs has man achieved! His railroads girdle the globe; his steamships reduce the oceans to a ferry. He makes Africa an island by sluicing the waters of the Mediterranean into the Red Sea; he lets daylight into the very heart of the Alps at St. Gothard and Mont Cenis; he runs the gimlet of science through the Berkshires for the Hoosac Tunnel; he levels a shelf for the rails along the precipices of the Rockies and the Andes; he spans the Firths and the Hudson and the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence and Niagara with his cables and cantilevers; and sets up the bars against the sea and the floods in the jetties and levees of the Mississippi and the dikes of the Netherlands. Such a builder is man!

For the more ostentatious yet less utilitarian triumphs the builders of the present need not be ashamed to look those of earlier centuries in the face. Had the ancients their hanging floral wonder at Babylon ? the moderns have the Eiffel Tower. Had Rhodes her Colossus ? our City by the Lake has its Ferris Wheel — the Eiffel Tower touched tip to base and set spinning on a shaft of steel. Alexandria may tell of her lighthouse that was; New York has her Statue of Liberty with electric torch flaming far over the sea to enlighten a world.

The Builder of Nations.

Man is a builder. Yet, though we spend our years amid the works of his hands, we shall not discover the greatest building in the world. Structures of wood and brick and granite and marble are not the greatest things that men have built. Did Rome rule the world ? Then it was the Roman breed of men who reared the power of Rome and made its standards to run conquering through the earth. Does Britannia rule the wave? It is the Anglo- Saxon blood that was fired by Cromwell and Blake and Nelson, which throbs with the lust of conquest and gain in the heart of middy and admiral, seaman, prince, and gunner alike, that makes the navies of the world dip their colors to the crimson cross and permits the Union Jack to wave without question over a quarter of the globe. Do the Stars and Stripes float on the breezes that blow in every harbor of the world as an ensign of freedom and the guaranty of the equal right of every man to the pursuit of his best good ? Then it thus swings for freedom because Pilgrim and Puritan, Cavalier and Huguenot, and the best blood of a score of nations mingled here to give the world a race of heroes and an asylum from oppression that would speed the coming of the kingdom of God.

Men are the builders of nations. Whatever for weal or woe America, England, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, Spain, Turkey, Japan, or any other nation is to-day, it is just what its citizens have made it. To man's honor or to his shame is the record of these lands. How do men build nations ? Let us see.

Here is a lad. His cradle is a basket. The hand that rocks it is the Nile. Out from that cradle, ere he can prattle, he is taken, and though having the face of a slave, he is made the fondling of a princess. The years pass. The babe becomes a man. Like a prince he has been educated. Like a prince he is placed at the head of armies and proves himself a master of men. The honors of the empire with a seat at the king's table are his, when the sound of groans wrung from the lips of a slave by the lash of a taskmaster ring in his ears. It is the voice of his own people. The face of the whipped slave is an image of his own. As this slave groans so groan a million more, and every groaning Hebrew is his brother. The iron runs into his soul. His blood is no longer Egyptian, but Hebrew as at birth, and choosing rather to suffer affliction and ignominy with a people whose God is the God of his fathers, a people who are his own people, than to longer dwell in the palace of Pharaoh, he smites the taskmaster to the ground. Egypt falls; Israel rises. And as with this taskmaster and slave so it was with the nations for whom they stand. This child of the Nile, pet of a princess, flees for his life, but flees to meet and com mune with God. It takes him forty years to get ready. Nations are not born in a day. Then he comes forth. He has talked with God, and his soul is on fire. In a year he has blighted Egypt and humbled Pharaoh. He hails the slaves as his people; leads them from bondage by a march which is itself a miracle; puts them to school in the wilderness; patiently endures until the discipline of time places a generation in their graves; then, in sight of the promised land, presents his successor to the people and presents to his successor a nation, with a God and a tabernacle, law and the machinery for its administration, an army drilled for victory, and a code of morals that was not bettered till Christ's day.

Moses was the maker of Israel. It was a man working through men that accomplished this wonder in the earth. More miraculous than plagues and divided waters, or fiery, cloudy pillar, or daily manna, or sweetened brine, was the making in less than half a century out of a mob of pusillanimous slaves a nation of conquerors with whom their former oppressors dared not cross arms for centuries. This did Moses, a man !

Look again. Israel is made, but it needs preservation and a capital. From the hills of Bethlehem runs a shepherd lad with a basket of homemade goodies for his big brothers in the army, carrying the old sling that is his constant companion. He finds that for weeks the Israelites have been defied by one gigantic warrior. There is need of a hero in Israel. He has arrived. The whiz of his sling is heard. The stone on which parading soldiers have stubbed their toes flies to its mark. The giant drops. The lad of the sling is triumphant. The stormy way to the throne opens before him. At last he is king; the Jebusites surrender their citadel, and Israel wins Jerusalem. David, the man, animating other men to dare as he dares, subdues rebellion, routs the enemies of Israel, wrings tribute from the surrounding nations, and prepares the way for the peaceful splendor of Solomon. Behold again what a man can do!

Young Europe has long been the toy of Asia. Attica has been the buffer on which the worst blows and woes have fallen. But Attica is now divided. A young ruler, with a state like " Little Rhody " at his back, comes to the fore. Demosthenes may thunder against him, but he becomes master of Greece. Hitherto Europe has defended herself as best she could against the invading hordes of Asia. This boy, with a sword between his teeth, will beard the Asiatic lion in his den. At Arbela the champions of two continents cross lances. Darius with the blood of the Medes and Persians and the million sons of Babylon, Nineveh, Susa, and the Ganges is on the one side. The army of Europe has less than fifty thousand — and Alexander. It is twenty to one, but the one wins! Night finds Darius dead; Persia, the last great oriental monarchy, lies a wreck; Asia in the dust; Europe in the saddle, the master, and to remain the master through the momentous centuries of the history of the race. Behold what one man can do!

England is in shame. A tyrant is on the throne, and brother knaves are the masters of the kingdom. The Reformation is born, and the foundations of the future are being swiftly laid. Which way will England swing ? To Rome or to the Reformation ? Will Catholicism or Protestantism master the commerce that is to spring up like magic at the touch of coming discoveries and inventions ? Will the New World become the child of Rome or of the Reformation ? No man can tell, yet these are the questions that are to be settled. Then a sturdy farmer leaves his plow and wins his way from a captaincy in, to the commandership of, the Parliamentary army, assists in the destruction of the royal disgrace of England, when Parliament itself goes wrong dares to turn it out of doors, and as there is none else to uphold the authority and power of the English nation, shoulders the burden himself, and as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth makes the peace of a master with all the enemies of England, wins for Britain that supremacy of the sea that she has never since resigned, "arrested the sails of Libyan pirates and the persecuting fires of Rome," humiliates Spain, the sponsor of Romanism, extorts from France the protection of her Protestant peoples, and proclaims in the ear of the prophet that because of him England and America shall be Protestant, and the rule of the world shall be theirs. Cromwell was the maker of modern England, and to him, with William of Orange and Wolfe at Quebec, we owe our inheritance in this land of freedom.

Paint this Puritan, " warts and all," for there were warts on his character as well as on his face, but still look ye, behold what a man can do ! Europe is a seething caldron of discontent. Kings and people have been emancipated from the power of the priesthood, but have not apprehended that law of mutual dependence that is the parent of enduring liberty. Power being in the hands of the kings, they have used it to grind the people into a fury of madness. In France the storm bursts. For centuries the Church and the State have been one, and the prime minister often a prince of the Church ; now against the Church as well as against the State the mob turns. Hell vomits all its brood of devils upon the unhappy land. The State is overthrown, and the heads of king, queen, and princes glut the guillotine. Church doors are walled up, for religion is no longer needed. Reason is enthroned, and men shall be their own gods. But man makes a poor god. Reason without righteousness is insane, and red-handed, blood-hungry fiends terrorize Paris and spread their infernal contagion throughout France. They who seize the sword shall perish at its edge, and self-constituted leader after leader is rushed through the terror to his death. For six years this satanic intermittent fever devastates the land ; then the master appears. Those who have danced in blood through every street in Paris now look into the mouths of shotted cannon. Diabolism falters. Hell is cowardly. Five feet one of man, with a sword in his hand, sends them scurrying to cover. The Directory plays its part, but only to make still more evident the need of a strong hand to cut the social cancer to the roots and save the body national. The Eighteenth of Brumaire ungloved that hand. Bonaparte is in the saddle. He crushes the mob and brings France to order. As First Consul he reconstructs society and the State, and after centuries of deficits surprises the nation with a surplus revenue. He inaugurates an era of vast public improvement, gives France its legal wonder — the Code Napoleon — and bids reason pull down its bloodspattered images and hearken to the voice of the Church again. Then follows the empire and the overturning of the thrones of Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the Italian principalities, and the quakings in the houses of Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanoff. Only England trembles not, and her mighty exertions save her only because she has three men — Pitt, Nelson, and Wellington — while France had but one. "Waterloo crushes the Corsican, but not until he had been used to teach the common people their power and make impossible the continued exercise of the old power of the kings. Look at this man, mighty in shame and in honor, so great as to "embarrass God,"* and behold in this maker of France and map-maker of Europe what a man can do!

Thirteen American colonies "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States;" that as such they may form a nation that shall assume for God and humanity the

* Victor Hugo Les Miserables.

GEORGE WASHINGTON.

"Providence left him childless, that his country might call him father." — H. T. Tuckerman.

" If among all the pedestals supplied by history for public characters of extraordinary nobility and purity I saw one higher than all the rest, and if I were required at a moment's notice to name the fittest occupant for it, I think my choice at any time during the last forty-five years would have lighted, and it would now light, upon Washington." — William E. Gladstone.

control of this new land. But who shall lead them to the freedom they demand ? From Virginia he comes with the words of Patrick Henry burning in his soul. Bunker Hill and the capture of Fort Ticonderoga have shown the temper of the patriot steel, and on June 15, 1775, by the Continental Congress, "the man who had saved the wreck of Braddock's army was called to build a nation. " * He did it. Against foes abroad and cabals at home he kept the torch of freedom blazing, and after eight years of war, years that tested the full strength of his character as few men in history have been tested, he received the sword of Cornwallis — the Old World's surrender of the New to itself! The war ended, the victorious leader set himself to the still greater task of merging into one nation these conflicting States. It was a task that tried his soul, but he succeeded, and this land of great States, yet a nation one and indivisible, sends forth from her peerless capital, named with his great name, a cry to all the earth: Look on him, our Washington! and behold what a man can do !

The land of Washington is in peril. The fires of an awful wrong have so roused the passions of one section of a great people that they cannot see their shame, and the dread of war or the loss of gain have made poltroons of their Northern brothers. Four million shackled slaves lift their plea for the God-given right to the ownership of their own flesh, and a nation cries aloud for a preserver. The South offers Clay, but he is a failure. New England presents Webster, but he plays the slave. The Keystone State gives Buchanan, but he proves a coward. The West offers Douglas, but he is without decision on the very question that is boiling the national caldron. Then from the people comes Lincoln, the rail-splitter. The man and the hour have met. Yet treason prospers, armies are de-

* Ridpath, History of the United States.

feated, friends become enemies, jealous nations vent their spleen, papal benedictions hurry toward supposed victors, the end of the nation of Washington seems nigh, and all is wrong along the Potomac. Alone, in the midst of darkness and rending tempests, the rail-splitter continues to chop wood. He gets on his knees to do it, and promises God that he will use war to bring freedom to the slave. Slowly, then, out of the wreck he picks men who will do his bidding, and armies that will follow worthy generals wherever they dare lead them. The scene changes. Treason trembles. Armies and ironclads are victorious. Friends become obsequious. Nations fawn. The pope gets red in the face. The Proclamation of Emancipation sets the liberty bells ringing from the Penobscot to the Golden Gate, and the Hallelujah Chorus rolls from the throats of jubilant freedmen from the James to the Rio Grande. March with the millions of the chief cities of the East, and look upon the silent face of the best friend the Southland ever had. Think whence he came, and what he was, and what he did. Stand in awe before that most precious clay that man ever bore to the tomb, clay that enshrined the soul of the noblest American, Abraham Lincoln! and, standing there, realize anew what God can do with a man. Yes, men are the builders of nations. Time would fail us to call the roll, for there is Charlemagne, the builder of the holy Roman Empire; Peter, the builder of Russia; Gustavus Adolphus, the builder of Sweden; William the Silent, the builder of Holland; Victor Emmanuel, the builder of Italy; Bismarck, the builder of Germany; Diaz, the builder of Mexico; Mutso Hito, the builder of Japan. Every nation has had its master builder.

The Builder of Science.

Now let us tack our ship of thought a bit. Man is not only the builder of nations; he is also the builder of science.

GALILEO.

He beheld the universe swinging in a pendulum.

" When science from Creation's face Enchantment's veil withdraws,

What glorious visions yield their place To cold material laws ! "

The Builder of Science. 23

A teacher of monks looks up at the stars until they talk to him, and he throws away the astronomic misinformation which has been the accumulation of five millenniums of philosophy, and startles the world with the doctrine that the earth " do move ! " Copernicus gives astronomy a new foundation on which Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo rear the enduring structure. Lippershey, the optician of Middleburg, contrives a glass by which the apparent size of objects is increased or the objects brought near. The philosopher of Padua grasps the idea, and gives the telescope to the world. This man Galileo has already knocked the props from under the Aristotelian system of philosophy, as Copernicus did from the Ptolemaic astronomy, by his demonstrations of the laws of motion and the discovery of the law of the pendulum. Now he turns his telescope toward the heavens, and men stand aghast as he dares to affirm that Copernicus was right. The earth does move! And more — there are spots on the sun! Jupiter has moons! The Milky Way is a storehouse of stars ! Of course they told him he lied; that he had spots on his eyes and moons in his head; but there was the telescope! They could see for themselves if prejudice would let them look. Though it died hard and made Galileo and many more men of the new way miserable in the dying, the old system had to give up the ghost. Modern science went marching on.

Then came Kepler. The old astronomy said that those celestial bodies which did move moved in circles. Kepler tested the theory and found it false. How, then, did they move ? He bade Mars tell him. Night after night, year in and year out, he raced around the heavens with this ruddy star. Day after day he toiled over his figures. At last Mars spoke. Observation and figures tallied. The planet's path was an ellipse, with the sun at one of the foci. It was so of the earth. It was so of all the planets.

It was the law of the universe ! Man had climbed up to the stars and discovered their paths. More — man was thinking after him the very thoughts of God! and now learned the courses that from eternity God had marked out for the stars.

The orbits of the planets were discovered, but what held them to their course ? The north stretched out over an empty place, and the earth hangeth upon nothing,* but how was all sustained ? There came a tiny Christmas baby to an English widow's home. The love of mechanics was in his blood, and he gave his life to figures. One day an apple fell, as a thousand million apples had fallen in preceding years. Why did it fall ? Not all the world could answer; but this man would be answered, for, answer him that, and he will tell you the law of the stars. The answer came. Out of his mind where the secrets of God were hiding he brought it forth. The apple fell because the earth attracted it and pulled it by unseen strings to itself. Was it so of the stars ? Did they attract each other ? fall toward each other ? yet were by this same attractive force exerted on every side held to their courses through the world-filled space ? It was true.