My portfolio : a collection of essays

Preface

The papers here republished are a selection of articles printed during the last few years in the columns of u The Congregationalist," " The Independent,' ' "The Christian Union," and " The Sunday School Times." The reception which has been given to them encourages me to believe that their usefulness may be extended in their present form.

A minister who is the son of a minister finds no other element in his professional training so valuable as the influence, obvious or latent, of his father. The mental life-stream flows from father to son with a more electric continuity than is often realized in any other profession. The consequent sense of filial obligation grows more profound with increasing years. It is with this consciousness of the very large place held in my own professional life by the colloquial instructions of my father, that I have given to his remarkable ministry the first portion of this volume.

AUSTIN PHELPS.

Andover Theological Seminary.

September, 1882.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. A Pastor of the Last Generation. I. . 1

II. A Pastor of the Last Generation. II. 14

Part I

When a man of God, who has been blessed in his work above the average of ministers, outlives his own generation, and the " cloud" of extreme old age has "received him out of our sight," may not filial reverence be pardoned in its desire to tell the living, and specially the youthful, ministry what manner of man he was ? Thus would I pay my last earthly tribute to my venerable father, by speaking of him to my younger brethren and my late pupils.

The Rev. Eliakim Phelps, D.D., died on the twenty-ninth day of December, 1880, at the residence of one of his sons in Weehawken, N.J., at the age of ninety years and nine months. He was of English Puritan descent through both father and mother. His was the seventh generation of the family name in this country. The first, the Hon. William Phelps, emigrated only ten years after the sailing of " The Mayflower." That Hon. William the family hold in great reverence. He was one of the leaders of the colony which marched from Dorchester through the unbroken wilderness to found the town of Windsor in Connecticut, in 1635. There he became a man of mark, as Stiles's " History " says, in both Church and State. He was one of the eight, who, by authority of the Massachusetts Legislature, constituted the first legislative and judicial body of the infant settlements of Connecticut.

The religious and political heritage of the family may be inferred from the fact, that several of them received grants of land from Oliver Cromwell, and that John, a younger brother of the pioneer William, was secretary to the Protector in 1654. At the Restoration he fled to Connecticut, where he lived in hiding, as the family legend reads, with the regicides Whalley and Goffe. Afterwards he went to Switzerland, and died at Vevay. Such were the ancestral memories which pervaded the home of my father's childhood. They gave him an almost intolerant antipathy to prelacy in all forms. Grim ancestors from the bar of Lord Jeffreys looked out through all his opinions of church government. He took great satisfaction in the fact that the blood of men persecuted by Laud and Strafford ran in his veins.

His father was a plain farmer in Hampshire County, Massachusetts; but he was one of the natural chiefs so often found in New-England towns, whose force of character lifts them into leadership in all local affairs. He was the perpetual selectman, moderator, counselor, referee, representative in the " Great and General Court," as the Legislature of Massachusetts was then respectfully entitled in the nomenclature of the hills. He represented Belchertown in that body for sixteen successive years. He bore striking resemblance in person and character to the Hon. Jeremiah Mason, late of the Boston bar.

One of the earliest and latest impressions I received of my father was that of his pardonable, though sometimes amusing, pride of family. Pardonable, because their knightly escutcheon, so dear to English blood ; and their descent in the shadowy past from the Italian "Welfs," — the German "Guelphs" of historic fame, — and their connection thus with the regnant house of Hanover on the throne of Great Britain ; and the perilous service of one of them in high office near the person of Cromwell; and their kindred, in the person of my father's grandmother, with Lady Jane Grey, whose name she bore, — were all merged and submerged, in his thoughts, in the one more than royal distinction, that, as far back as the family name could be traced in historic record, every one in his own branch of it had been either a minister or other dignitary of the Church of Christ. It was a life-long cause of gratulation to him that he inherited the blood of eight generations of Christian ministers and deacons. This fact I have known ever since I can remember. The gewgaws of ancestral fame before mentioned I did not hear of till I was near manhood ; and some of them I then learned not from him, but from the comments of an English visitor on our family door-plate.

I have never known a man — I have known a few women — who had a more profound reverence than he had for the office and work of a Christian pastor. To him they were above all other dignities on earth. He honestly believed that the pastoral office had no superior. He refused to advise my exchange of a pastoral pulpit for a professorship at Andover. When he called on Gen. Jackson, then President of the United States, his associates were amused at the stately repose with which he greeted the nation's head. To be a preacher of the gospel was a loftier honor than to be a prince of the blood-royal. So pervasive was this conviction in the atmosphere of his household, that I distinctly remember my resolve, before I was four years old, that I would become a minister ; not so much because the ministry was my father's guild, as because he had taught me nothing above that to which ambition could aspire. Was not ours the house of Aaron, and ours the tribe of Levi?

In a New-England inland town three-quarters of a century ago, it was a decree fore-ordained, that such a youth as he was should find or make his way to the college and the pulpit. It was one of the prerogatives of a Congregational pastor to foresee the predestined clergymen among the youth of his charge. It was in the religious faith of a New-England family that such a predestination must be executed, at whatever cost to them. My father's pastor set the prophetic eye on him at the " spelling-bees," which were the climax of the examinations at the village schoolhouse. My father commonly led off one of the contending battalions, under the pastor's imperial review. Samuel to the sons of Kish was hardly more authoritative.

Thus called, " as if a man had inquired at the oracle of God," he saw only a question of time. He went through the hardships of poverty, which have made so many of our New-England clergy self-reliant and original theologians. Being one of nine children compelled to hatchel a living from a Hampshire County hill-farm of about two hundred acres, rocks and whortleberries included, he could receive but little aid from his father. He worked at the rocks and the whortleberries till he was nineteen years of age. He has often pointed out to me the bowlders which he blasted to make a rude mountain-road from the homestead to the turnpike. That road was like the road to Jerusalem. It was the only avenue from the farm to the two chief essentials of existence to a Yankee family, — the schoolhouse and the church.

In summers he reaped the rye-field with a handsickle; wheat being a rare luxury, reserved for the honor of hospitality, or as the honest mother, not adroit of speech, used to express it, "for /ear somebody should come." He either attended or "kept" the district school three months in the winters. He held the plow with a Latin grammar tucked under his waistband, and conjugated " amo " while the oxen rested at the end of the furrow. One of the first tokens which his father detected of the son's destiny was the discovery that "Eliakim," with the same yoke of oxen, could not plow as large a patch of ground in a day as his younger brother. He did not overwork the oxen. Twice a week he walked three miles and a half, after his day's work was done, to recite to his pastor in the evening, trudging back again in the moonlight or the storm, as it might happen. In his twentieth winter, after chopping wood with his brothers from dawn to twilight, he read a second-hand Virgil at night, lying flat on the kitchen-floor, before the huge old-fashioned fireplace, while his brothers and sisters were hatcheling flax around him. They were too thrifty to burn other lights than that of the pine-knots which they had providently saved from the wood-pile of the summer before. He thus created a perpetual weeping of one eye, which discouraged scholarly tastes in him through life, and became the theme of friendly banter, when, thirty years later, he used to address the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. His introductory gesture was usually a comical slap at his weeping eye.

He went to college in a homespun suit from the fleece of the sheep he had washed and sheared; he wore stout brogans made by an itinerant cobbler from the hide of the cow he had milked and fatted ; having made with his own hands, of boards from the tree he had felled, the paper-lined trunk which contained his scanty wardrobe and more scanty library.

In such privations, not thought of as self-denials, the foundations of the man were laid. Wordsworth's "plain living and high thinking" are seldom more grandly illustrated than in the unconscious heroism of many of our New-England youth on their way from the plow to the pulpit. Dr. Sprague's " Annals of the American Pulpit " indicate that a large majority of the successful ministers of the last generation went through the discipline of the straitened purse and the frugal home. We who have never known any other than homes of ease and culture know very little of the cost of our inheritance. They were great men, who amidst the adjuncts of manual labor only, and the talk- about beeves and swine, with scarcely an intellectual stimulus in their homes, except the report from the town-meeting, and the daily prayer, and the word of God, began the line of culture in their families. That is a costly heritage which they have transmitted in gentle blood to their children and their children's children. It may take, as wise men tell us, three generations to turn out a scholar thoroughbred ; but all honor to him, who, in obedience to the cravings of an aspiring spirit, heads the trio.

My father entered, well fitted for those times, the sophomore class of Brown University in 1811. After two years of study he was attracted, by the then splendid fame of Dr. Nott, to Union College, where he graduated, with an honorary oration, in 1814. Among his collegiate associates were the Rev. Benjamin B. Wisner, D.D., of the Old South Church, Boston; the Rev. Francis Wayland, D.D., president of Brown University; the Rev. Joel Hawes, D.D., of Hartford ; and the late President of the United States, Martin Van Buren.

He was one of a class of sixteen, formed as the nucleus of a theological seminary at Schenectady, but which was soon transferred, and became the well-known seminary at Auburn, N.Y. His chief theological training he received from Dr. Nott and Dr. Yates of Union College. The theology of Dr. Nott was — what it was. To his pupil it seemed very slippery : he could not grasp it. That of Dr. Yates was the Confession of Dort pure and simple. With him the young theologue held stout controversy in the " Conflict of the Ages." He could repeat the Westminster Catechism by heart when he was twelve years old. But the theology of his manhood, both of heart and head, he fashioned for himself in those friendly jousts with Dr. Yates. It was New England grappling with Old Holland. The young Puritan fought it out as if nobody had ever crossed swords in the same fight before. He built his theology as if he were laying the foundations of the world de novo. In temperament, and by necessity of original make, he was a "New- School man." If he had been trained to an adamantine interpretation of the Confession of Dordrecht, before President Edwards was born, he would have floundered out of it, in some way, into some equivalent of the " New-England theology." He was to that " manner born." Yet to his consciousness every iota of it was a discovery of his own. That which Froude says of Latimer was true of him, — " He was not an echo, but a voice."

In this, as in some other things, he strongly resembled the late Rev. Dr. Finney of Oberlin. The theological elements were so compacted in the intellectual make of both of them, that no drill of the schools, and no authority of council or synod, could ever have made a high Calvinist of either. In those conversational encounters with Dr. Yates, Dr. Phelps was unconsciously preparing for the part he afterwards acted in opposition to the disruption of the Presbyterian Church in 1837-1838.

He read theology also, for a while, with the Rev. Dr. Wittar of Wilbraham, Mass. I am unable to find traces of the influence of that estimable pastor in the subsequent life of his pupil. I suspect that the magnet which drew him secretly to Wilbraham was, that, in the choir of the village church, the young and beautiful one was waiting for his coming, who became the helpmeet of his ministry for nearly thirty years, and whom he gratefully recognized as his superior in power with God. Of her, not long before his death, when memory, dying to other things, grew young again to that golden age, he said, " Nine and twenty years we walked together, and I never knew her to do a wrong thing, or to say an unwise one."

A son is a less impartial judge of a mother's character than of that of a father. Are there any mothers who are not Madonnas? But disinterested observers of this one have told me that her remarkable judgment, her reticence of speech, and her pre-eminent religious culture, well deserved her husband's tribute. The promise, "He shall give his angels charge over thee," was fulfilled to him in the presence of one ministering spirit in earthly form. He was one of the many successful pastors who owe their success largely to prudent and godly wives. He was one of the few who have grace to see and acknowledge the obligation.

He was licensed to preach by the Congregational Association of ministers of Windham County, Connecticut. It was his purpose to seek a settlement in the then destitute regions of " the West." This probably meant Western New York, which was then rapidly filling up with families from New England, or, at the farthest, Ohio, where exploring missionaries were then traversing forests by the aid of blazed trees. But by one of those minute providences which turn the little rill of a man's career far back near its trickling springs, he was invited to supply the pulpit of the church in West Brookfield, Mass., for two sabbaths, while another man, to whom a " call " had been given, should deliberate and decide upon his answer. The result was, that he became the pastor of that ancient church, as colleague with the Rev. Dr. Ward, in 1816.

That church was then composed, to a considerable extent, of members who had been admitted under the "Halfway Covenant." The youthful pastor gave unmistakable token of his future by making it a condition of his settlement that that disastrous usage should be abolished. The change could not be achieved by a vote. It encountered bitter opposition, and was a long process. But he was sustained by the best element in the church, at the head of which he reckoned his powerful and constant friend, the Hon. Judge Foster, grandfather of the Hon. Dwight Foster, late of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. The private counsel, as well as the public support, of Judge Foster, was of great value to him in that perilous beginning of his career. We of this generation have little conception of the difficulty in those times of making an orthodox faith and an active spiritual religion seem intellectually and socially respectable. One man of high culture and equal piety in a community was a tower of strength to a young preacher of the despised faith.

One word expresses in miniature his character as a preacher. He belonged to that class of preachers, who by temperament, as well as by theological conviction and providential opportunity, are revivalists; not itinerant evangelists, but pastoral leaders of spiritual reformations. Certain men in the ministry seem created by God for that service. The best of them are found in the pastoral office. They are nqt only profound believers in the reality of such works of divine grace, but they possess natural gifts and tastes which make them a power in popular awakenings. They are prophets in their discernment of the conditions in which such awakenings are practicable. They foresee them in their coming. They have electric affinities with the heart of live audiences. With such gifts is combined a certain power of " natural selection " in their choice of homiletic materials and methods. I call it " natural selection," because it is much more the working of the oratorical instinct, moved by the grace of God, than of any scholastio teaching, or of conscious deliberation. The result is a marvelous power of quickening, and of command over great assemblies.

They are not merely direct and pungent preachers, whose aim is to convert souls. Other men are all that who have not their success. Often, indeed usually, they are not men of accomplished scholarship ; nor are their successes necessarily evidence of uncommon spiritual attainments. Men not eminent in these respects often possess the revival temperament, and its cognate gifts, in such large development as to give character to their whole ministry. Wherever they go, they are awakening powers in the pulpit. To the unconverted their voice is as the trump of judgment. Dead churches are quickened at their summons. Torpid communities groveling in worldliness are lifted into an upper atmosphere.

Religious inquirers find in these men a wonderful insight into spiritual conditions, and tact in meeting spiritual wants. Though not learned men, they have " the tongue of the learned." They speak the word in season. Common people hear them gladly. A certain power to steady in the very act of arousing, and so to hold well in hand, the emotions of packed audiences, enables them to achieve a wise economy of the moral forces, so as to promote great results in brief time and with the minimum of waste of sensibility. This is the look of their work to critical observers. For the most part, they are themselves unconscious of the profound and complicated art which they practice. Like other chosen builders of great things, they build better than they know.

Part II

The providence of God works with its chosen instruments. Men of the revival temperament described in the preceding pages, God commonly calls, by obvious opportunity, to leadership in great awakenings. For this cause came they into the world. Sometimes, like the elder Edwards, they are men of, in one sense, profound learning and eminent piety ; but they are not necessarily such. Nor are their temperament and their providential work very friendly to either the tastes or the habits of eminent scholarship. The combination of all these elements in one man is very rare. When has a second Edwards appeared in our American churches ? Indeed, was even his learning, in the sense of knowledge of libraries, any thing burdensome? The providence of God appears often very daring in its choice of imperfect instruments to do marvelous things.

Such preachers as the Rev. Dr. Davies of Virginia, the Rev. Gilbert Tennent of New Jersey, the Rev. Dr. Nettleton of Connecticut, the Rev.

Lyman Beecher in Boston, the Rev. Dr. Taylor of New Haven, the Rev. Dr. Finney of Oberlin, the Rev. Dr. Blackburn of Missouri, and the Rev. Dr. Kirk of Boston, were representatives of this class of preachers. In the direct work of converting souls, and augmenting the numbers of the church, these men had no superiors. Such men do not execute as well, nor do they often estimate at its true value, the work of educating churches up to the more mature experience of a sanctified culture. To this class of preachers the subject of this sketch belonged. Almost immediately after his ordination at West Brookfield, that venerable church began to quake as it had never done before since the Pequot war. His voice was that of one crying in the wilderness. Professors of religion under the "Halfway Covenant" were shaken out of their dreams. As usual, the awakening of men and women of blameless lives roused opposition. Some of the honored leaders of the church feared such an unwonted ado about religion. It was not comfortable. Things were not as they used to be. What was that but fanaticism ? Evening meetings were objected to. Their fathers had not been guilty of evening meetings. Tallow candles — and the ancient church edifice contained no provision for any thing better — were not a churchly means of illumination in divine things. It was denounced as a disorder, if not a sin, to carry public worship into times and places which God had not consecrated to the purpose. Did not the Lord know how much time could be wisely given to public praying? The danger of nocturnal meetings to the youth of the two sexes was dreaded with pious horror. Unusual anxiety was felt for the overworked sexton. All things considered, what was the world coming to? The headstrong young preacher who was turning it upside down was threatened with a short pastorate.

On one occasion his spirit was stirred within him at seeing a crowd of the young men surrounding his own door at the hour he had appointed for a meeting of religious inquiry. Their hope was to intimidate the young women from attending it. As he approached, they fell back to the right and the left ; and, as he walked up between, he cheerily invited them all to enter with him. " Whales in the sea God's voice obey." Laughing and jesting, the crowd followed him in. The dignity and beauty of the young wife awed them. Some of them were soon weeping; and before the winter was over the majority of them were converted.

His was one of the earliest Sunday schools established in this country. At the time, he knew of but one other. He organized his own on the very next day after he heard of one. Some of the best members of his church thought it a desecration of the sabbath. They refused to send their children. He might have been overcome in the controversy, had he not been supported by the wise counsel of Judge Foster. Said the judge to the opposers, "If you know your own interests, you will not drive this young man from you by refusing to let him work in his own way. Every captain must be master of his own ship. Give him time, and see what comes of it." Time showed that the Lord was with the young man.

On another occasion, a party of rude fellows sent to him a beautiful but notorious woman, who had been the ruin of some of them, persuading her to represent herself as an inquirer, anxious for her soul's salvation. They hoped to entangle him in some indiscretion. He detected the sham the instant she made known her errand. He turned, and invited his young wife to remain at the interview ; and, after kneeling in prayer, he gave to the poor creature an admonition of such caustic fidelity, that she went back to the sons of Belial, and told them that she had been on a fool's errand, and that it would take longer heads than theirs to " catch the parson."

The revival advanced with increasing power, till the visible fruits of the " Halfway Covenant " were nearly eradicated from the church, and the whole town was pervaded by a new spirit. The work extended also into surrounding towns. He was sent for from far and near to labor in similar scenes. He was not partial to " evangelism " in the conduct of revivals in the older settlements of the country. His theory was, that mutual pastoral help was more effective, and less dangerous to the unity and good order of the churches. On this theory he acted. Braintree, Spencer, Somers, Warren, Sturbridge, Ware, Worcester, Northampton, Boston, and other places, witnessed the success of his preaching, especially in arousing the impenitent, and leading them to Christ. Thirty years afterwards I found traces of his wrrrk still remaining among the older members of the Park-street Church, in which he preached six weeks in the midst of a revival. Deacon Proctor, a well-known officer of that church, if I mistake not, met the decisive crisis of his religious life at that time.

The spirit of progressive enterprise led the country minister to organize a temperance society at West Brookfield, on the principle of total abstinence, when only one other member, even of the Brookfield Association of Ministers, supported the movement. He was the first clergyman of the county to remove the liquor-bottles from his sideboard. He bore calmly the charge that he did it from parsimonious motives. An aged clerical associate, who had more than once been seen to stagger up the pulpit-stairs on a Sunday afternoon, begged of his young brother not to be wiser than his fathers, nor more temperate than his blessed Master. For one, he wanted no better example than the Lord Jesus.

The mind of the young pastor was at that time on the alert to discover and to welcome any good cause. Foreign missions were a novelty to the American churches. Edward Everett satirized them in rhetoric unequaled. They found in my father a congenial spirit from the first. It was one of the entertainments of my childhood to teach the alphabet, when I knew little more mjself, to the heathen youth whom he took into his family. The first missionary mechanic sent to the Hawaiian Islands was a member of his congregation. At the same time he was one of the most active friends of Amherst College, and one of the clerical donors to its treasury when its existence was imperiled. It was once my privilege to count the pile of silver-pieces on his table, which he had collected, in response to the appeal of Professor Stuart, for the library of Andover Seminary, — so varied and broadcast were the sympathies of the country parson.

The initiation which he received to the work of the pulpit by a powerful work of divine grace, wrought an effect on him which is often witnessed in the experience of pastors of the revival temperament. He fell into a snare. When years passed, and the revival was not repeated, he became restless and dissatisfied. They seemed to him years of waste. Theorize as he might about it, and his theory was correct enough, yet it was not in the nature of things that he should find in the slow education of the church the same bounding pulse of activity, and the same sense of achievement and of conquest, which exhilarated him when the tide of the religious awakening ran high. This is one of the re-actionary evils of revivals of which pastors need to take wise account. He, in his youthful and impatient zeal, did not. Like the rest of us, he read providences through the lens of temperament and prepossession, and at length persuaded himself that God called him elsewhere. He resigned his charge, and became the principal of the "Ladies' High School" at Pittsfield, Mass.

But scarcely was he inaugurated to his new office, when he discovered that he had committed, as he always afterwards called it, the great mistake of his life. He had left his heart, and the best capabilities of his nature, behind him, in the pulpit which he had abandoned. God had called him from the sheepfold to preach, not to teach. He reproached himself with ascetic severity for having allowed himself to be allured or driven from the true work of his life. But, at that humiliating juncture, his life illustrated signally the magnanimity with which God often overrules the mistakes of his chosen ones.

It happened that the pulpit of the First Church in Pittsfield was then vacant, by reason of the absence of its invalid pastor on a long furlough.' My father was invited to be its pastor pro tempore. He engaged in the work with the humility of a penitent prodigal. The result, under God, was a revival of marvelous power, even for that favored town, which had but recently enjoyed the ministry of the Rev. Dr. Humphrey. In a few months, more than three hundred converts were admitted to the churches, the majority of them attributing their conversion to my father's labors. He was once more in his natural element. Night and day he labored for souls, and God gave him his heart's desire.