Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D Part 11

I have watched its workings with the greatest interest, often with admiration, and sometimes--may I say?--with anxiety. There was a time when I greatly feared that you would go the lengths of Parker. The turn in your mind to what I deem healthier views took place about the time I went abroad; and the relief your letters gave me while I was in Europe, you can hardly have suspected. Now, it seems to me, you are liable to go to the opposite extreme. The truth is, your intellectual insight seems to me greater than your breadth of view, your penetration greater than your comprehension; and the consequence has been a course of thought, as I believe you are aware, somewhat zigzag.

Have I not thought of you, my dear fellow? I guess I have; and among other things I have so thought of you that I now entirely confide in the magnanimity of [198] your mind to receive with candor all this, and more if I should say it,--saying it, as I do, in the truest love and cherishing of you.

My love to E. and all the phalanstery.

As ever, yours,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

P. S. I read this letter to my wife last evening, and I told her of your criticism on the sermon at Providence. She made the very rejoinder that I made to you,--"The power to cast one's self on the great Christian resource, to put one's self in relation with G.o.d the Father and with spiritual help, is the very power which he denies to human nature, and the very thing that Mr. H. contended for." Nor yet do I like your mode of statement, for Christianity does not represent itself to me as a sort of Noah's Ark, and human nature as in stormy waters,--to be saved if it can get its foot on that plank, and not otherwise. I prefer my figure of the shower specially sent on the feeble and half-withered plant. All the divines of every school have always said that there is light enough in nature, if with true docility and love men would follow it. Christ came to shed more light on our path, not the only light; to lift up the lame man, not to create limbs for him or to be limbs for him.

And I confess, too, that I do not like another aspect in the state of your mind; and that is, that your newly wakened zeal should fasten, as it seems to do, upon the positive facts and the supernaturalism of Christianity. Not, as I think, that I undervalue them. I do not know if any rational and thinking man that lays more stress on them in their place than I do. But certainly there is something beyond to which they point; and that is, the [199] deep spiritualism of the Gospel, the deep heart's repose and sufficiency in things divine and infinite. If your mind had fastened upon this as the newly found treasure in the Gospel, I should have been better satisfied. I am writing very frankly to you, as you are wont to write to me (and I believe that you and I can bear these terms, and bless them too), and therefore I will add that my greatest distrust of your spiritual nature turns to this very point: whether you have, in the same measure as you have other things, that deep heart's rest, that quiet, profound, all-sufficing satisfaction in the infinite resource, in the all-enbosoming love of the All-Good, in silent and solitary communion with G.o.d, settling and sinking the soul, as into the still waters and the ocean depths. Your nature runs to social communions, to visible movements, to outwardness, in short, more than to the central depths within. The defects in your preaching, which I have heard pointed out by the discerning, are the want of consistency,--of one six months with another six months,--and the want of spiritual depth and vitality; of that calm, deep tone of thought and feeling that goes to the depths of the heart.

G.o.d knows that I do very humbly attempt to criticise another's religion and preaching, being inexpressibly concerned about the defects of my own. And, dear friend, I speak to you as modestly as I do frankly. I may be wrong, or I may be only partly right. But in this crisis I think that I ought to say plainly what I feel and fear. I cannot bear, for every reason,--for your sake and for the sake of the church, in which, for your age, you are rooting yourself so deeply,--that you should make any misstep on the ground upon which you seem to be entering.

[200] To Rev. William Ware.

SHEFFIELD, Dec. 6, 1847.

MY DEAR WARE,--I think my pen will run on, with such words to start from, though it have spent itself on the weary "Sermons." This is Monday morning, and I am not quite ready in mind to begin on a new one. The readiness, with me, is nine tenths of the battle. I never, or almost never, write a sermon unless it be upon a. subject that I want to write upon. I never cast about for a subject; I do not find the theme, but the theme finds me. Last week I departed from my way, and did lot make good progress. The text, "What shall it profit t man?" struck upon my heart as I sat down on Monday Horning, and I wrote it at the head of my usual seven sheets of white paper, and went on. But the awfulness if the text impressed me all the while with the sense of allure, and though the sermon was finished, I mainly felt at the end that I had lost my week.

One thing I find in my preaching, more and more, and hat is that the simplest things become more and more weighty to me, so that a sermon does not require to be my thing remarkable to interest me deeply.

Everything hat I say in the pulpit, I think, is taking stronger and stronger hold upon me, and that which might have been lull in my utterance ten years ago, is not so now. I say his to you, because it has some bearing on one of the natters discussed in our last letters; that is, whether I should leave the pulpit. If I leave it, it will be with a fresher life in it, I think, than has stirred in me at any previous part of my course. And certainly I have long believed that it was my vocation to preach, above all things,--more than to visit parishioners, though I always [201] visit every one of them once a year,--more than to write, though you say I have written to some purpose (and your opinion is a great comfort to me). Certainly, then, I shall not retire from the pulpit, but upon the maturest reflection and for what shall seem to be the weightiest reasons. And I did not mean that the things I referred to should be prima facie reasons for retirement; but the question with me was whether my unprofessional way of thinking and acting were not so misconstrued as to lessen my power to do good; whether the good I do is in any proportion to the strength I lay out.

But enough of myself, when I am much more concerned about you. I see plainly enough how intense is your desire to go to Rome. I see how all your culture and taste and feeling urge you to go, and yet more what a reason in many ways your health supplies. And I declare the author of Zen.o.bia and Probus and Julian ought to go to Rome! There is a fitness in it, and I trust it will come to pa.s.s. But you should not go alone.

Every one wants company in such a tour,--that I know full well; but your health demands it. You must not be subject to sudden seizures in a strange city,--a stranger, alone. Your family never will consent to it, and I think never ought to. Do give up that idea entirely,--of going alone. Have patience. There will be somebody to go with next spring, or next summer. I would that I could go with you where you go, and lodge with you where you lodge. But somebody will go. Something better will turn up, at any rate, than to go alone. There are young men every year who want to go abroad in quest of art and beauty and culture, and to whom your company would be invaluable. I do not forget the difficulty about expense. But there are those who, like you, would be [202] glad to go directly by Ma.r.s.eilles or Leghorn. It is quite true that movement is the mischief with the purse.-Abiding in Rome or Florence, you can live for a dollar a day. A room, or two rooms (parlor and little sleeping-room), say near the Piazza di Spagna, or the Propaganda just by, can be hired, with bed, etc., all to be kept in order, for three or four pauls (thirty or forty cents, you know) a day. And you can breakfast at a colt; any time you fancy, while wandering about, for two pauls, and dine at a trattoria for from two to four pauls. I have more than once dined on a bowl of soup and bread and b.u.t.ter for two pauls. I hate heavy dinners. In Rome, one should always take a room in which the sun lies. "Where the sun comes, the doctor does n't," they say there.

But you won't go before I come and see you and talk it all over with you. Don't fail to let me know if you set seriously about it, for I shall certainly come. The truth is, Airs. Ware should go with you. It is true the women are very precious when it comes to casting them up in a bill of expense, as in all things else. Does not that last clause save me, madam? And, madam dear, I want to talk with you about this project of William's, as much as I want to hear what he says.

About the war, dear Gulielmus, and slavery, and almost everything else under heaven, I verily believe I think just as you do; so I need not write. And my hand is very tired. With ten thousand blessings on you,

Yours ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

[203]

To his Daughter Mary.

SHEFFIELD, July 13, 1848.

DEAR MOLLY,--You're an awful miss when you're not here; what will you be, then, when you descend upon us from the heights of Lenox,--from the schools of wisdom, from fiction and fine writing, from tragedy and comedy, from mountain mirrors reflecting all-surrounding beauty, down to plain, prosaic still-life in Sheffield? I look with anxiety and terror for the time; and, to keep you within the sphere of familiarity as much as possible, I think it best to write sometimes; and, to adopt the converse of the Western man's calling his bill "William," I call my William, bill,--my Mary, Molly, thereby softening, mollifying (as I may say) the case as much as possible.

One thing I must desire of you. You are on an experiment. [FN: To try whether the air of Lenox, on the hills, would have any effect in averting an annual attack of hay-fever.] Now be honest. Don't bring any "sneeshin" down here to throw dust in our poor, simple eyes in the valley. Much as ever we can see anything for fogs. Mind ye, I shall be sharp, though. If you fall into any of those practices, I shall say you brought the trick from Lenox. You may say "I-ketch-you" as much as you please, but you won't ketch me.

To Rev. Henry W. Bellows.

SHEFFIELD, Dec. 19, 1848.

MY DEAR BELLOWS,--Now shall I heap coals of fire on your head. You ought to have written to me forty days ago. Your letter bears date of yesterday. I [204] received it this afternoon. I am replying this evening. How does your brain-pan feel, with this coal upon it? "How has it happened that there has been no communication?" Why, it has happened from your being the most unapprehensive mortal that ever lived, or from your having your wits whirled out of you by that everlasting New York tornado. As to letters, I wrote the two last, though the latter was a bit of one. As to the circ.u.mstances, my withdrawal from your society was involuntary, and painful to me. You should have written at once to your emeritus coadjutor, your senior friend. I have been half vexed with you, my people quite.

There! I love you too much not to say all that. But I am not an exacting or punctilious person, and that is one reason why we have got along so well together 3 as well as that you are one whom n.o.body can know without taking a plaguy kindness and respect for, and can't help it. And all that you say about our past relation and intercourse I heartily reciprocate, excepting that which does you less than justice, and me more. As to deep talks, I really believe there is no chance for them in Gotham. And this reminds me that my wife has just been in my study to desire me to send a most earnest invitation to you and E. to come up here this winter and pa.s.s a few days with us. It will be easier than you may think at first. The New York and New Haven Railroad will be open in a few days, and then you can be here in seven or eight hours from your own door. Do think of it,--and more than think of it.

To the Same.

ARE n't you a pretty fellow,--worse than Procrustes,--to go about the world, measuring people's talent and [205] promise by their noses? . . .

Why, man, Claude Lorraine and Boccaccio and Burke had "small noses;" and Kosciusko and George Buchanan had theirs turned up, and could n't help it. It reminds me of what a woman of our town said, who had married a very heinous-looking blacksmith. Some companions of our "smithess" saw him coming along in the street one day, and unwittingly exclaimed, "What dreadful-looking man is that?" "That's my husband," said the wife, "and G.o.d made him."

To the Same.

SHEFFIELD, Jan. 2, 1849.

MY DEAR BELLOWS,--Your letter came on New Year's Day, and helped to some of those cachinnations usually thought to belong to such a time; though for my part I can never find set times particularly happy or even interesting,--partly, I believe, from a certain obstinacy of disposition that does not like to do what is set down for it.

As to church matters, I said nothing to you when I was down last, because I knew nothing. That is, I had no hint of what the congregation was about to do,--no idea of anything in my connection with the church that needed to be spoken of. I was indeed thinking, for some weeks before I went down, of saying to the congregation, that unless they thought my services very important to them, I should rather they would dispense with them, and my mind was just in an even balance about the matter. But one is always influenced by the feeling around him,--at least I am,--and when I found that every one who spoke with me about my coming again seemed to depend upon it, and to be much [206] interested in it, I determined to say nothing about withdrawing. My reasons for wishing to retire were, that I was working hard--hard for me--to prepare sermons which, as my engagement in my view was temporary, might be of no further use to me; and that if I were to enter upon a new course of life, the sooner I did so the better.

And here I may as well dispose of what you and others say and urge with regard to my continuance in the profession. To your question whether I have not sermons enough to last me for five years in some new place, I answer, No, not enough for two. And if I had, I tell you that I cannot enter into these affecting and soul-exhausting relations again and again, any more than I could be married three or four times. The great trial of our calling is the wrenching, the agonizing, of sympathy with affliction; and there is another trying thing which I have thought of much of late, and that is the essential moral incongruity of such relations, and especially with strangers. I almost feel as if n.o.body but an intimate friend had any business in a house of deep affliction. In a congregation ever so familiar there is trial enough of this kind. If my friend is sick or dying, I go to his bedside of course, but it is as a friend,--to say a word or many words as the case may be; to look what I cannot say; to do what I can. But to come there, or to come to the desolate mourner, in an official capacity,--there is something in this which is in painful conflict with my ideas of the simple relations of man with man. Now all this difficulty is greatly increased when one enters upon a new ministration in a congregation of strangers. Therefore on every account I must say, no more pastoral relations for me. I cannot take [207] up into my heart another heap of human chance and change and sorrow. Do you not see it? Why, what takes place in New Bedford now moves me a hundred times more than all else that is in the world. And so it will always be with all that befalls my brethren in the Church of the Messiah.

As to the world's need of help, I regard it doubtless as you do; and I am willing and desirous to help it from the pulpit as far as I am able.

But I cannot hold that sort of irregular connection with the pulpit called "supplying "; nor can I go out on distant missionary enterprises,--to Cincinnati, Mobile, or New Orleans. The first would yield me no support; and as to the last, I must live in my family.

Besides, there is sphere enough with the pen; and study may do the world as much good as action. And there is no doubt what direction my studies must take. Why, I have written out within a week--written incontinently in my commonplace book, my pen would run on--a thesis on Pantheism nearly as long as a sermon. And as to preaching, what ground have I to think that mine is of any particular importance? Not that I mean to affect any humility which I do not feel. I profess that I have quite a good opinion of myself as a preacher. Seriously; I think I have one or two rather remarkable qualifications for preaching,--a sense of reality in the matter of the vitality of the thing, and then an edge of feeling (so it seems to me) which takes off the technical and commonplace character from discourse. Oh! if I could add, a full sense of the divineness of the thing, I should say all. Yet something of this, too, I hope; and I hope to grow in this as I hope to live, and do not dread to die. But though I think all this, with all due modesty, it does not [208] follow that others do; and the evidence seems to be rather against it, does it not?

As ever, yours,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

In connection with this letter, and with his own frank but moderate estimate of his gift as a preacher, it is interesting to read the following extract from a paper in his memory, read before the annual meeting of the American Unitarian a.s.sociation by Rev. Dr. Briggs, May 30, 1882:

"I remember well the way in which he seemed to me to be a power in the pulpit. He was the first man who made the pulpit seem to me as a throne.

When he stood in it, I recognized him as king. I remember how eager I was to walk in from the Theological School at Cambridge to hear him when there was an opportunity to do so in any of the pulpits of Boston. I remember walking with my cla.s.smate, Nathaniel Hall,--when the matter of the expense of a pa.s.sage was of great concern to me,--to Providence, where Mr. Dewey was to preach at the installation of Dr. Hall. My Brother Hall was not drawn there simply for the sake of his brother's installation, I, not from the fact that Providence was the home of my boyhood; but both of us, more than by anything else, by our eager desire to hear this preacher where he might give us a manifestation of his power. And, as he spoke from the text, I have preached righteousness in the great congregation,' we felt that we were well repaid for all our efforts to come and listen to him.

"I have heard of some one who heard him preach from the text on dividing the sheep from the goats, and as he came away, he said, I felt as if I were standing before [209] the judgment-seat.' I remember hearing him preach from the text, Thou art the man,' and I felt that that word was addressed to me as directly as it was by the prophet to the king. His was a power scarcely known to the men of this later generation.

"It would be difficult, I think, to a.n.a.lyze his character and mind, and to say just in what his power consisted. He did not have the reasoning power that distinguished Dr. Walker; he did not have the poetic gift that gave such a charm to the sermons of Ephraim Peabody; he did not have that peculiarity of speech which made the sermons of Dr. Putnam so effective upon the congregation, and yet he was the peer of any one of them. It was, I think, because the truth had possession of his whole being when he spoke. It was because he always had a high ideal of the pulpit, and was striving to come up to it, and because he went to the pulpit with that preparation which alone makes any preaching effective, and which will make it mighty forever."

To Rev. Henry W. Bellows.

SHEFFIELD, Feb. 26, 1849.

MY DEAR BELLOWS,--I came from Albany to-day at noon, and have had but this afternoon to reflect upon your letter. But I see that you ought to have an answer immediately; and my reply to your proposition to me grows out of such decided considerations, that they seem to me to require no longer deliberation. I see that you desire my help, and I am very sorry that I cannot offer it to you; but consider. You ask of me what, with my habits of thought and methods of working, would be equal to writing one sermon is a fortnight. I [210] would rather do this than to write four or even three columns for the "Inquirer," considering, especially, that I must find such a variety of topics, and must furnish the tale of brick every week. I have always been obliged to work irregularly, when I could; and this weekly task-work would allow no indulgence to such poor habits of study. Besides, this task would occupy my whole mind; that is, such shattered mind as I have at present to give to anything; I could do nothing else,--nothing to supply my lack of means to live upon. I could better take the "Christian Examiner;" it would cost me much less labor, and it would give me the necessary addition to my income, provided I could find some nook at the eastward where I could live as cheaply as I can here.

I think the case must be as plain to your mind as it is to mine. If I were to occupy any place in your army, it would be in the flying artillery; these solid columns will never do for me. Why, I can't remember the time when I have written twenty-five sermons in a year, and that, I insist, is the amount of labor you desire of me. You may think that I overrate it, and you speak of my writing from "the level of my mind." The highest level is low enough, and this I say in sad sincerity.

In fact, if nothing offers itself for me to do that I can do, I think that I shall let the said mind lie as fallow ground for a while, hoping that, through G.o.d's blessing, leisure and leisurely studies may give strength for some good work by and by. How to live, in the mean time, is the question; but I can live poor, and must, if necessary, trench upon my princ.i.p.al. But if I am driven to this resort, I will make thorough work of it; I will bind myself to no duty, professional, literary, or journalistic; if a book, or a little course of lectures, or any other little thing comes out from under [211] my hands at the end of one, two, or three years, let it; but I will do nothing upon compulsion, though the things to do be as thick as blackberries. There's my profession of--duty! I have worked hard, however imperfectly. I have worked in weariness, in tribulation, and to the very edge of peril; and I believe that the high Taskmaster, to whom I thus refer with humble and solemn awe, will pardon me some repose, if circ.u.mstances beyond my control a.s.sign it to me for my lot.

As to the "Inquirer," in times past, you should remember that in what I said of it that was disparaging, I excepted your part in it. That certainly has not lacked interest, whatever else it has lacked.

You have, I think, some remarkable qualifications for the proposed enterprise; and if you could give your whole mind and life to it, I should augur more favorably of such a monarchy than of the proposed oligarchy. You are a live man; you have a quick apprehension of what is going on about you; you have insight, generosity, breadth of view. And yet, if I were fully to state what I mean by this last qualification, I should say it is breadth rather than comprehension. You see a great way on one side of a subject, rather than all round. This requires a great deal of quiet, silent study, and where you are going to find s.p.a.ce for it, I do not see, look all round as I may, or may pretend to. What I shall most fear about the "Inquirer" is, that it will give an uncertain sound; and this danger will be increased by the number of minds brought into it. a.s.sociate editors ought to live near to each other, and to compare notes. How do you know that Mr. C. will not cross Mr.O.'s track, or both of them Mr. Bellows, even if Mr. Bellows do not cross his own?

You say you will put your own stamp upon the paper, [212] of course. But your stamp has been rather indefinite as yet. "Shaper and Leader," say you? Suggester and Pioneer, rather, is my thought of your function. This is pretty plain talk; but, confound you, you can bear it. And I can bear to say it, because I love--because I like you, and because I think of you as highly, I guess, as you ought to think of yourself. After all, I do expect a strong, free, living journal from you, and the men of your age, or thereabouts, who are united with you.

You say that I do not understand a "certain spirit of expectation and seeking" in these men. Perhaps not; it is vaguely stated, and I cannot tell. One of these days you will spread it out and I shall see. I have ideas of progress, with which my thoughts are often wrestling, and I shall be glad to have them made more just, expanded, and earnest. With love to all,