T. De Witt Talmage Part 13

A wise physician skilled our wounds to heal Is more than armies to the public weal.

Some may remember the stalwart figure of Dr. Joseph Hutchinson, one of the best American surgeons. For some years, in the streets of Brooklyn, he was a familiar and impressive figure on horseback. He rode superbly, and it was his custom to make his calls in that way. He died in this year. Daniel Curry was another significant, superior man of a different sort, who also died in the summer of 1887. He was an editor and writer of the Methodist Church. At his death he told one thing that will go into the cla.s.sics of the Church; and five hundred years beyond, when evangelists quote the last words of this inspired man, they will recall the dying vision that came to Daniel Curry. He saw himself in the final judgment before the throne, and knew not what to do on account of his sins. He felt that he was lost, when suddenly Christ saw him and said, "I will answer for Daniel Curry." In this world of vast population it is wonderful to find only a few men who have helped to carry the burden of others with distinction for themselves. Most of us are driven.

In the two years and a half that our Democratic party had been in power, our taxes had paid in a surplus to the United States treasury of $125,000,000. The whole country was groaning under an infamous taxation.

Most of it was spent by the Republican party, three or four years before, to improve navigation on rivers with about two feet of water in them in the winter, and dry in summer. In the State of Virginia I saw one of these dry creeks that was to be improved. Taxation caused the war of the Revolution. It had become a grinding wheel of government that rolled over all our public interests. Politicians were afraid to touch the subject for fear they might offend their party. I touch upon it here because those who live after me may understand, by their own experience, the infamy of political piracy practised in the name of government taxation.

We had our school for scandal in America over-developed. A certain amount of exposure is good for the soul, but our newspaper headlines over-reached this ideal purpose. They cultivated liars and encouraged their lies. The peculiarity of lies is their great longevity. They are a productive species and would have overwhelmed the country and destroyed George Washington except for his hatchet. Once born, the lie may live twenty, thirty, or forty years. At the end of a man's life sometimes it is healthier than he ever was. Lies have attacked every occupant of the White House, have irritated every man since Adam, and every good woman since Eve. Today the lie is after your neighbour; to-morrow it is after you. It travels so fast that a million people can see it the next morning. It listens at keyholes, it can hear whispers: it has one ear to the East, the other to the West. An old-fashioned tea-table is its jubilee, and a political campaign is its heaven. Avoid it you may not, but meet it with calmness and without fear. It is always an outrage, a persecution.

Nothing more offensive to public sentiment could have occurred than the attempt made in New York in the autumn of 1887 to hinder the appointment of a new pastor of Trinity Church, on the plea that he came from a foreign country, and therefore was an ally to foreign labour. It was an outrage on religion, on the Church, on common sense. As a nation, however, we were safe. There was not another place in the world where its chief ruler could travel five thousand miles, for three weeks, unprotected by bayonets, as Mr. Cleveland did on his Presidential tour of the country. It was a universal huzzah, from Mugwumps, Republicans, and Democrats. We were a safe nation because we destroyed Communism.

The execution of the anarchists in Chicago, in November, 1887, was a disgusting exhibition of the gallows. It took ten minutes for some of them to die by strangulation. Nothing could have been more barbaric than this method of hanging human life. I was among the first to publicly propose execution by electricity. Mr. Edison, upon a request from the government, could easily have arranged it. I was particularly horrified with the blunders of the hangman's methods, because I was in a friend's office in New York, when the telegraph wires gave instantaneous reports of the executions in Chicago. I made notes of these flashes of death.

"Now the prisoners leave the cells," said the wire; "now they are ascending the stairs"; "now the rope is being adjusted"; "now the cap is being drawn"; "now they fall." Had I been there I would probably have felt thankful that I was brought up to obey the law, and could understand the majesty of restraining powers. One of these men was naturally kind and generous, I was told, but was embittered by one who had robbed him of everything; and so he became an enemy to all mankind.

One of them got his antipathy for all prosperous people from the fact that his father was a profligate n.o.bleman, and his mother a poor, maltreated, peasant woman. The impulse of anarchy starts high up in society. Chief among our blessings was an American instinct for lawfulness in the midst of lawless temptation. We were often reminded of this supreme advantage as we saw pa.s.sing into shadowland the robed figure of an upright man.

The death of Judge Greenwood of Brooklyn, in November, 1887, was a reminder of such matters. He had seen the nineteenth century in its youth and in its old age. From first to last, he had been on the right side of all its questions of public welfare. We could, appropriately, hang his portrait in our court rooms and city halls. The artist's brush would be tame indeed compared with the living, glowing, beaming face of dear old Judge Greenwood in the portrait gallery of my recollections.

The national event of this autumn was President Cleveland's message to Congress, which put squarely before us the matter of our having a protective tariff. It was the great question of our national problem, and called for oratory and statesmanship to answer it. The whole of Europe was interested in the subject. I advocated free trade as the best understanding of international trading, because I had talked with the leaders of political thought in Europe, and I understood both sides, as far as my capacity could compa.s.s them. In America we were frequently compared to the citizens of the French Republic because of our nervous force, our restlessness, but we were more patient. In 1887, the resignation of President Grevy in France re-established this fact.

Though an American President becomes offensive to the people, we wait patiently till his four years are out, even if we are not very quiet about it. We are safest when we keep our hands off the Const.i.tution. The demonstration in Paris emphasised our Republican wisdom. Public service is an altar of sacrifice for all who worship there.

The death of Daniel Manning, ex-Secretary of the Treasury, in December, 1887, was another proof of this. He fell prostrate on the steps of his office, in a sickness that no medical aid could relieve. Four years before no one realised the strength that was in him. He threw body and soul into the whirlpool of his work, and was left in the rapids of celebrity. In the closing notes of 1887, I find recorded the death of Mrs. William Astor. What a sublime lifetime of charity and kindness was hers! Mrs. Astor's will read like a poem. It had a beauty and a pathos, and a power entirely independent of rhythmical cadence. The doc.u.ment was published to the world on a cold December morning, with its bequests of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the poor and needy, the invalids and the churches. It put a warm glow over the tired and grizzled face of the old year. It was a benediction upon the coming years.

THE TWELFTH MILESTONE

1888

It seems to me that the constructive age of man begins when he has pa.s.sed fifty. Not until then can he be a master builder. As I sped past the fifty-fifth milestone life itself became better, broader, fuller. My plans were wider, the distances I wanted to go stretched before me, beyond the normal strength of an average lifetime. This I knew, but still I pressed on, indifferent of the speed or strain. There were indications that my strength had not been dissipated, that the years were merely notches that had not cut deep, that had scarcely scarred the surface of the trunk. The soul, the mind, the zest of doing--all were keen and eager.

The conservation of the soul is not so profound a matter as it is described. It consists in a guardianship of the gateways through which impressions enter, or pa.s.s by; it consists in protecting one's inner self from wasteful a.s.sociations.

The influence of what we read is of chief importance to character. At the beginning of 1888 I received innumerable requests from people all over New York and Brooklyn for advice on the subject of reading. In the deluge of books that were beginning to sweep over us many readers were drowned. The question of what to read was being discussed everywhere.

I opposed the majority of novels because they were made chiefly to set forth desperate love sc.r.a.pes. Much reading of love stories makes one soft, insipid, absent-minded, and useless. Affections in life usually work out very differently. The lady does not always break into tears, nor faint, nor do the parents always oppose the situation, so that a romantic elopement is possible. Excessive reading of these stories makes fools of men and women. Neither is it advisable to read a book because someone else likes it. It is not necessary to waste time on Shakespeare if you have no taste for poetry or drama merely because so many others like them; nor to pa.s.s a long time with Sir William Hamilton when metaphysics are not to your taste. When you read a book by the page, every few minutes looking ahead to see how many chapters there are before the book will be finished, you had better stop reading it. There was even a fashion in books that was absurd. People were bored to death by literature in the fashion.

For a while we had a Tupper epidemic, and everyone grew busy writing blank verse--very blank. Then came an epidemic of Carlyle, and everyone wrote turgid, involved, twisted and breakneck sentences, each noun with as many verbs as Brigham Young had wives. Then followed a romantic craze, and everyone struggled to combine religion and romance, with frequent punches at religion, and we prided ourselves on being sceptical and independent in our literary tastes. My advice was simply to make up one's mind what to read, and then read it. Life is short, and books are many. Instead of making your mind a garret crowded with rubbish, make it a parlour, substantially furnished, beautifully arranged, in which you would not be ashamed to have the whole world enter.

There was so much in the world to provoke the soul, and yet all persecution is a blessing in some way. The so-called modern literature, towards the close of the nineteenth century, was becoming more and more the illegitimate offspring of immaturity in thought and feeling. We were the slaves of our newspapers; each morning a library was thrown on our doorstep. But what a jumbled, inconsequent, muddled-up library! It was the best that could be made in such a hurry, and it satisfied most of us, though I believe there were conservative people who opened it only to read the marriage and the death notices. The latter came along fast enough.

In January, 1888, that well-known American jurist and ill.u.s.trious Brooklynite, Judge Joseph Neilson, died. He was an old friend of mine, of everyone who came upon his horizon. For a long while he was an invalid, but he kept this knowledge from the world, because he wanted no public demonstration. The last four years of his life he was confined to his room, where he sat all the while calm, uncomplaining, interested in all the affairs of the world, after a life of active work in it. He belonged to that breed which has developed the brain and brawn of American character--the Scotch-Irish. If Christianity had been a fallacy, Judge Neilson would have been just the man to expose it. He who on the judicial bench sat in solemn poise of spirit, while the ablest jurists and advocates of the century were before him to be prompted, corrected, or denied, was not the man to be overcome by a religion of sophistry or mere pretence. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase said that he had studied the Christian religion as he had studied a law case, and concluded that it was divine. Judge Neilson's decisions will be quoted in court rooms as long as Justice holds its balance. The supremacy of a useful life never leaves the earth--its influence remains behind.

The whole world, it seemed to me, was being spiritualised by the influences of those whose great moments on earth had planted tangible and material benefits, years after they themselves were invisible. It was an elemental fact in the death chamber of Mr. Roswell, the great botanist, in England; in the relieved anxieties in Berlin; in the jubilation in Dublin; by the gathering of n.o.blemen in St. Petersburg; and in the dawn of this new year. I could see a tendency in European affairs to the unification of nations.

The German and the French languages had been struggling for the supremacy of Europe. As I foresaw events then, the two would first conquer Europe, and the stronger of the two would swallow the other.

Then the English language would devour that, and the world would have but one language. Over a million people had already began the study of Volapuk, a new language composed of all languages. This was an indication of world nationalisation. Congresses of nations, meeting for various purposes, were establishing brotherhood. It looked as though those who were telling us again in 1888 that the second coming of Christ was at hand were right. The divine significance of things was greater than it had ever been.

There was some bigotry in religious affairs, of course. In our religion we were as far from unity of feeling then as we had ever been. The Presbyterian bigot could be recognised by his armful of Westminster catechisms. The Methodist bigot could be easily identified by his declaration that unless a man had been converted by sitting on the anxious seat he was not eligible. The way to the church militant, according to this bigot, was from the anxious seat, one of which he always carried with him. The Episcopal bigot struggled under a great load of liturgies. Without this man's prayer-books no one could be saved, he said. The Baptist bigot was bent double with the burden of his baptistry.

"It does not seem as if some of you had been properly washed," he said, "and I shall proceed to put under the water all those who have neglected their ablutions." Religion was being served in a kind of ecclesiastical hash that, naturally enough, created controversy, as very properly it should. In spite of these things, however, some creed of religious faith, whichever it might be, was universally needed. I hope for a church unity in the future. When all the branches in each denomination have united, then the great denominations nearest akin will unite, and this absorption will go on until there will be one great millennial Church, divided only for geographical convenience into sections as of old, when it was the Church of Laodicea, the Church of Philadelphia, the Church of Thyatira. In the event of this religious evolution then there will be the Church of America, the Church of Europe, the Church of Asia, the Church of Africa, and the Church of Australia.

We are all builders, bigots, or master mechanics of the divine will.

The number of men who built Brooklyn, and who have gone into eternal industry, were increasing. One day I paused a moment on the Brooklyn Bridge to read on a stone the names of those who had influenced the building of that span of steel, the wonder of the century. They were the absent ones: The president, Mr. Murphy, absent; the vice-president, Mr. Kingsley, absent; the treasurer, Mr. Prentice, absent; the engineer, Mr. Roebling, absent. Our useful citizens were going or gone. A few days after this Alfred S. Barnes departed. He has not disappeared, nor will until our Historical Hall, our Academy of Music, and Mercantile Library, our great asylums of mercy, and churches of all denominations shall have crumbled. His name has been a bulwark of credit in the financial affairs over which he presided. He was a director of many universities. What reinforcement to the benevolence of the day his patronage was! I enjoyed a warm personal friendship with him for many years, and my grat.i.tude and admiration were unbounded. He was a man of strict integrity in business circles, the highest type of a practical Christian gentleman. Unlike so many successful business men, he maintained an unusual simplicity of character. He declined the Mayoralty and Congressional honours that he might pursue the ways of peace.

The great black-winged angel was being desperately beaten back, however, by the rising generation of doctors, young, hearty, industrious, ambitious graduates of the American universities. How bitterly vaccination was fought even by ministers of the Gospel. Small wits caricatured it, but what a world-wide human benediction it proved. I remember being in Edinburgh a few weeks after the death of Sir James Y.

Simpson, and his photograph was in every shop window, in honour of the man who first used chloroform as an anaesthetic. In former days they tried to dull pain by using the hasheesh of the Arabs. Dr. Simpson's wet sponge was a blessing put into the hands of the surgeon. The millennium for the souls of men will be when the doctors have discovered the millennium for their bodies.

Dr. Bush used to say in his valedictory address to the students of the medical college, "Young gentlemen, you have two pockets: a large pocket and a small pocket. The large pocket is for your annoyances and your insults, the small pocket for your fees."

In March, 1888, we lost a man who bestowed a new dispensation upon the dumb animals that bear our burdens--Henry Bergh. Abused and ridiculed most of his life, he established a great work for the good men and women of the ensuing centuries to carry out. Long may his name live in our consecrated memory. In the same month, from Washington to Toledo, the long funeral train of Chief Justice White steamed across country, pa.s.sing mult.i.tudes of uncovered heads bowed in sorrowing respect, while across the sea men honoured his distinguished memory.

What a splendid inheritance for those of us who must pa.s.s out of the mult.i.tude without much ado, if we are not remembered among the bores of life. There were bores in the pulpit who made their congregations dread Sundays; made them wish that Sunday would come only once a month. At one time an original Frenchman actually tried having a Sunday only once every ten days. A minister should have a conference with his people before he preaches, otherwise how can he tell what medicine to give them? He must feel the spiritual pulse. Every man is a walking eternity in himself, but he will never qualify if he insists on being a bore, even if he have to face sensational newspaper stories about himself.

I never replied to any such tales except once, and that once came about in the spring of 1888. I regarded it as a joke. Some one reported that one evening, at a little gathering in my house, there were four kinds of wine served. I was much interviewed on the subject. I announced in my church that the report was false, that we had no wine. I did not take the matter as one of offence. If I had been as great a master of invective and satire as Roscoe Conkling I might have said more. In the spring of this year he died. The whole country watched anxiously the news bulletins of his death. He died a lawyer. About Conkling as a politician I have nothing to say. There is no need to enter that field of enraged controversy. As a lawyer he was brilliant, severely logical, if he chose to be, uproarious with mirth if he thought it appropriate.

He was an optimist. He was on board the "Bothnia" when she broke her shaft at sea, and much anxiety was felt for him. I sailed a week later on the "Umbria," and overtaking the "Bothnia," the two ships went into harbour together. Meeting Mr. Conkling the next morning, in the North-Western Hotel, at Liverpool, I asked him if he had not been worried.

"Oh, no," he said; "I was sure that good fortune would bring us through all right."

He was the only lawyer I ever knew who could afford to turn away from a seat on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. He had never known misfortune. Had he ever been compelled to pa.s.s through hardships he would have been President in 1878. Because of certain peculiarities, known to himself, as well as to others, he turned aside from politics. Although neither Mr. Conkling nor Mr. Blaine could have been President while both lived, good people of all parties hoped for Mr. Conkling's recovery.

The national respect shown at the death-bed of the lawyer revealed the progress of our times. Lawyers, for many years in the past, had been ostracised. They were once forbidden entrance to Parliament. Dr. Johnson wrote the following epitaph, which is obvious enough:--

G.o.d works wonders now and then; Here lies a lawyer an honest man.

THE THIRTEENTH MILESTONE

1888-1889

The longer I live the more I think of mercy. Fifty-six years of age and I had not the slightest suspicion that I was getting old. It was like a crisp, exquisitely still autumn day. I felt the strength and buoyancy of all the days I had lived merging themselves into a joyous antic.i.p.ation of years and years to come. For a long while I had cherished the dream that I might some day visit the Holy Land, to see with my own eyes the sky, the fields, the rocks, and the sacred background of the Divine Tragedy. The tangible plans were made, and I was preparing to sail in October, 1889. I felt like a man on the eve of a new career. The fruition of the years past was about to be a great harvest of successful work. I speak of it without reserve, as we offer prayers of grat.i.tude for great mercies.

Everything before me seemed finer than anything I had ever known. Few men at my age were so blessed with the vigour of health, with the elixir of youth. To the world at large I was indebted for its appreciation, its praise sometimes, its interest always. My study in Brooklyn was a room that had become a picturesque starting point for the imagination of kindly newspaper men. They were leading me into a new element of celebrity.

One morning, in my house in Brooklyn, I was asked by a newspaper in New York if it might send a reporter to spend the day with me there. I had no objection. The reporter came after breakfast. Breakfast was an awkward meal for the newspaper profession, otherwise we should have had it together. I made no preparation, set no scene, gave the incident no thought, but spent the day in the usual routine of a pastor's duty. It is an incident that puts a side-light on my official duties as a minister in his home, and for that reason I refer to it in detail. Some of the descriptions made by the reporter were accurate, and ill.u.s.trative of my home life.

My mail was heavy, and my first duty was always to take it under my arm to my workshop on the second floor of my home in South Oxford Street. In doing this I was closely followed by the reporter. My study was a place of many windows, and on this morning in the first week of 1888 it was flooded with sunshine, or as the reporter, with technical skill, described it, "A mellow light." The sun is always "mellow" in a room whenever I have read about it in a newspaper. The reporter found my study "an unattractive room," because it lacked the signs of "luxury" or even "comfort." As I was erroneously regarded as a clerical Croesus at this time the reporter's disappointment was excusable. The Gobelin tapestries, the Raphael paintings, the Turkish divans, and the gold and silver trappings of a throne room were missing in my study. The reporter found the floor distressingly "hard, but polished wood." The walls were painfully plain--"all white." My table, which the reporter kindly signified as a "big one," was drawn up to a large window. Of course, like all tables of the kind, it was "littered." I never read of a library table in a newspaper that was not "littered." The reporter spied everything upon it at once, "letters, newspapers, books, pens, ink bottles, pencils, and writing-paper." All of which, of course, indicated intellectual supremacy to the reporter. The chair at my table was "stiff backed," and, amazing fact, it was "without a cushion." In front of the chair, but on the table, the reporter discovered an "open book," which he concluded "showed that the great preacher had been hurriedly called away." In every respect it was a "typical literary man's den." Glancing shrewdly around, the reporter discovered "bookshelves around the walls, books piled in corners, and even in the middle of the room." Also a newspaper file was noticed, and--careless creature that I am--"there were even bundles of old letters tied with strings thrown carelessly about." The reporter then said:--

"He told me this was his workshop, and looked me in the face with a merry twinkle in his eye to see whether I was surprised or pleased."

Then I asked the reporter to "sit down," which he promptly did. I was closely watched to see how I opened my mail. Nothing startling happened.

I just opened "letter after letter." Some I laid aside for my secretary, others I actually attended to myself.