CHAPTER XL EDWARD EVERETT HALE
To give a complete and truthful account of my own life, the name of Edward Everett Hale should appear on almost every page. I became a member of his parish in Worcester in August, 1849. Wherever I have been, or wherever he has been, I have been his parishioner ever since. I do not undertake to speak of him at length not only because he is alive, but because his countrymen know him through and through, almost as well as I do.
He has done work of the first quality in a great variety of fields. In each he has done work enough to fill the life and to fill the measure of fame of a busy and successful man. I have learned of him the great virtue of Hope; to judge of mankind by their merits and not their faults; to understand that the great currents of history, especially in a republic, more especially in our Republic, are determined by great and noble motives and not by mean and base motives.
In his very best work Dr. Hale seems always to be doing and saying what he does and says extempore, without premeditation. Where he gets the time to acquire his vast stores of knowledge, or to think the thoughts we all like to hear, nobody can tell. When he speaks or preaches or writes, he opens his intellectual box and takes the first appropriate thing that comes to hand.
I do not believe we have a more trustworthy historian than Dr. Hale, so far as giving us the motive and pith and essence of great transactions. He is sometimes criticised for inaccuracy in dates or matters that are trifling or incidental. I suppose that comes from the fact that while he stores away in his mind everything that is essential, and trusts to his memory for that, he has not the time, which less busy men have, to verify every unsubstantial detail before he speaks or writes. Sir Thomas Browne put on record his opinion of such critics in the "Christian Morals."
"Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition and human Lapses, may make not only Moles but Warts in learned Authors, who notwithstanding, being judged by the capital matter, admit not of disparagement. I should unwillingly affirm that Cicero was but slightly versed in Homer, because in his Work De Gloria he ascribed those verses unto Ajax, which were delivered by Hector. Capital Truths are to be narrowly eyed, collateral Lapses and circumstantial deliveries not to be too strictly sifted. And if the substantial subject be well forged out, we need not examine the sparks which irregularly fly from it."
When Dr. Hale was eighty years old, his countrymen manifested their affection for him in a manner which I think no other living man could have commanded. It was my great privilege to be asked to say to him what all men were thinking, at a great meeting in Boston. The large and beautiful hall was thronged with a very small portion of his friends. If they had all gathered, the City itself would have been thronged. I am glad to associate my name with that of my beloved teacher and friend by preserving here what I said. It is a feeble and inadequate tribute.
The President of the United States spoke for the whole country in the message which he sent:
WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, Mar. 25, 1902.
My dear Sen. Hoar: I very earnestly wish I could be at the meeting over which you are to preside in honor of the eightieth birthday of Edward Everett Hale. A classical allusion or comparison is always very trite; but I suppose all of us who have read the simpler classical books think of Timoleon in his last days at Syracuse, loved and honored in his old age by the fellow citizens in whose service he had spent the strength of his best years, as one of the noblest and most attractive figures in all history. Dr. Hale is just such a figure now.
We love him and we revere him. We are prouder of our citizenship because he is our fellow citizen; and we feel that his life and his writing, both alike, spur us steadily to fresh effort toward high thinking and right living. To have written "The Man Without a Country" by itself would be quite enough to make all the nation his debtor. I belong to the innumerable army of those who owe him much, and through you I wish him Godspeed now.
Ever faithfully yours,
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
I spoke as follows:
"If I try to say all that is in my heart to-night, I do not know where to begin. If I try to say all that is in your hearts, or in the hearts of his countrymen, I do not know where to leave off. Yet I can only say what everybody here is silently saying to himself. When one of your kindred or neighbors comes to be eighty years old, after a useful and honored life, especially if he be still in the vigor of manly strength, his eye not dim or his natural force abated, his children and his friends like to gather at his dwelling in his honor, and tell him the story of their gratitude and love. They do not care about words. It is enough if there be pressure of the hand and a kindly and loving glance of the eye. That is all we can do now. But the trouble is to know how to do it when a man's friends and lovers and spiritual children are to be counted by the millions. I suppose if all the people in this country, and, indeed in all the quarters of the globe, who would like to tell their gratitude to Dr. Hale, were to come together to do it, Boston Common would not hold them.
"There is once in a while, through the quality is rare, an author, a historian, or a writer of fiction, or a preacher, or a pastor, or an orator or poet, or an influential or beloved citizen, who in everything he says or does seems to be sending a personal message from himself. The message is inspired and tinctured and charged and made electric with the quality of the individual soul. We know where it comes from. No mask, no shrinking modesty can hide the individuality. Every man knows from whom it comes, and hails it as a special message to himself. We say, That is from my friend to me! The message may be read by a million eyes and reach a million souls. But every one deems it private and confidential to him.
"This is only, when you come to think of it, carrying the genius for private and personal friendship into the man's dealing with mankind. I have never known anybody in all my long life who seemed to me to be joined by the heart- strings with so many men and women, wherever he goes, as Dr. Hale. I know in Worcester, where he used to live; I know in Washington, where he comes too seldom, and where for the last thirty-three years I have gone too often, poor women, men whose lives have gone wrong, or who are crippled in body or in mind, whose eyes watch for Dr. Hale's coming and going, and seem to make his coming and going, if they get a glimpse of him, the event they date from till he comes again. To me and my little household there, in which we never count more than two or three, his coming is the event of every winter.
"Dr. Hale has not been the founder of a sect. He has never been a builder of partition walls. He has helped throw down a good many. But still, without making proclamation, he has been the founder of a school which has enlarged and broadened the Church into the Congregation, and which has brought the whole Congregation into the Church.
"When he came, hardly out of his boyhood, to our little parish in Worcester, there was, so far as I know, no Congregational church in the country whether Unitarian or of the ancient Calvinistic faith, which did not require a special vote and ceremonial of admission to entitle any man to unite with his brethren in commemorating the Saviour as he desired his friends and brethren to remember him by the rite of the last supper. Until then, the Christian communion was but for a favored few. Mr. Hale believed that the greater the sinfulness of the individual soul the greater the need and the greater the title to be taken into the fellowship and the brotherhood of the Saviour of souls. So, without polemical discussion, or any heat of controversy, he set the example which has been so widely followed. This meant a great deal more than the abolition of a ceremonial or the change of a rubric. It was an assertion of the great doctrine, never till of late perfectly comprehended anywhere, that the Saviour of men came into the world inspired by the love of sinners, and not for an elect and an exclusive brotherhood of saints.
"We are not thinking chiefly of another world when we think of Dr. Hale or when we listen to him. He has been telling us all his life that what the theologians call two worlds are but one; that the Kingdom of God is here, within and around you; that there is but one Universe and not two; that the relation of man to God is that of father and child, not of master and slave, or even of sovereign and subject; that when man wields any of the great forces of the Universe, it is God also who is wielding them through him; that the power of a good man is one of God's powers, and that when man is doing his work faithfully the supreme power of God's omnipotence is with him.
"Dr. Hale has done a good many things in his own matchless fashion. He would have left a remarkable name and fame behind him if he had been nothing but a student and narrator of history, as he has studied and told it; if he had been nothing but a writer of fiction—the author of 'The Man Without a Country,' or 'Ten Times One is Ten,' or 'In His Name'—if he had done nothing but organize the Lend a Hand clubs, now found in the four quarters of the world; if he had been nothing but an eloquent Christian preacher; if he had been nothing but a beloved pastor; if he had been only a voice which lifted to heaven in prayer the souls of great congregations; if he had been only a public-spirited citizen, active and powerful in every good word and work for the benefit of this people; it he had been only the man who devised the plan that might have saved Texas from slavery, and thereby prevented the Civil War, and which did thereafter save Kansas; if he had been only remembered as the spiritual friend and comforter of large numbers of men and women who were desolate and stricken by poverty and sorrow; if he had been only a zealous lover of his country, comprehending, as scarcely any other man has comprehended, the true spirit of the American people; if he had been any one of these things, as he has been, it would be enough to satisfy the most generous aspiration of any man, enough to make his life worth living for himself and his race. And yet, and yet, do I exaggerate one particle, when I say that Dr. Hale has been all these, and more?
"Edward Everett Hale has been the interpreter of a pure, simple loving and living faith to thousands and thousands of souls. He has taught us that the fatherhood and tenderness of God are manifested here and now in this world, as they will be hereafter; that the religion of Christ is a religion of daily living; that salvation is the purifying of the soul from sin, not its escape from the consequences of sin. He is the representative and the incarnation of the best and loftiest Americanism. He knows the history of his country, and knows his countrymen through and through. He does not fancy that he loves his country, while he dislikes and despises his countrymen and everything they have done and are doing. The history he loves and has helped to write and to make is not the history of a base and mean people, who have drifted by accident into empire. It is the history of such a nation as Milton conceived, led and guided by men whom Milton would have loved. He will have a high and a permanent place in literature, which none but Defoe shares. He possesses the two rarest of gifts, that to give history the fascination of fiction, and that to give fiction the verisimilitude of history. He has been the minister of comfort in sorrow and of joy in common life to countless persons to whom his friendship is among their most precious blessings, or by whose fireside he sits, personally unknown, yet a perpetual and welcome guest.
"Still, the first duty of every man is to his own family. He may be a warrior or a statesman, or reformer, or philanthropist, or prophet or poet, if he careth not first for his own household, he is worse than an infidel. So the first duty of a Christian minister is still that of a pastor to his own flock. You know better than I do how it has been here in Boston; but every one of our little parish in Worcester, man or woman, boy or girl, has felt from the first time he or she knew him, ever afterward, that Dr. Hale has been taking hold of his hand. That warmth and that pressure abide through all our lives, and will abide to the end. There are countless persons who never saw his face, who still deem themselves his obedient, loving and perpetual parishioners.
"I knew very well a beautiful woman, left widowed, and childless, and solitary, and forlorn, to whom, after every other consolation seemed to have failed to awake her from her sorrow and despair, a friend of her own sex said: 'I thought you were one of Edward Hale's girls.' The appeal touched the right chord and brought her back again to her life of courage and Christian well-doing.
"He has ever been a prophet of good hope and a preacher of good cheer. When you have listened to one of his sermons, you have listened to an evangel, to good tidings. He has never stood aloof from the great battles for righteousness or justice. When men were engaged in the struggle to elevate the race for the good of their fellow men, no word of discouragement has ever come from his lips. He has recalled no memory of old failure in the past. He has never been found outside the ranks railing at or criticising the men who were doing the best work, or were doing the best work they knew how to do. He has never been afraid to tackle the evils that other men think hopeless. He has uttered his brave challenge to foemen worthy of his steel. Poverty and war and crime and sorrow are the enemies with whom he has striven.
"I do not know another living man who has exercised a more powerful influence on the practical life of his generation. He has taught us the truth, very simple, but somehow nobody ever got hold of it till he did, that virtue and brave living, and helping other men, can be made to grow by geometrical progression. I am told that Dr. Hale has more correspondents in Asia than the London Times. I cannot tell how many persons are enrolled in the clubs of which he was the founder and inspirer.
"But I am disqualified to do justice to the theme you have assigned to me. For an impartial verdict you must get an impartial juryman. You will have to find somebody that loves him less than I do. You cannot find anybody who loves him more. To me he has been a friend and father and brother and counsellor and companion and leader and instructor; prophet of good hope, teacher of good cheer. His figure mingles with my household life, and with the life of my country. I can hardly imagine either without him. He has pictured for us the infinite desolation of the man without a country. But when his time shall come, what will be the desolation of the country without the man?
"And now what can we give you who have given us so much? We have something to give you on our side. We bring you a more costly and precious gift than any jewel or diadem, though it came from an Emperor's treasury.
Love is a present for a mighty King.
"We bring you the heart's love of Boston where you were born, and Worcester where you took the early vows you have kept so well; of Massachusetts who knows she has no worthier son, and of the great and free country to whom you have taught new lessons of patriotism, and whom you have served in a thousand ways.
"This prophet is honored in his own country. There will be a place found for him somewhere in the House of many Mansions. I do not know what will be the employment of our dear friend in the world whose messages he has been bringing to us so long. But I like to think he will be sent on some errands like that of the presence which came to Ben Adhem with a great wakening light, rich and like a lily in bloom, to tell him that the name of him who loved his fellow men led all the names of those the love of God had blessed."