I.
In the community in which one lives, no less than in himself, often lies the secret of a man’s strength and greatness. The individual shares the endowment or potency of those impersonal forces which sustain and enhance public life. The spirit which animates the broader ranges of general history acts with unhindered freedom on the narrower sphere of the individual mind and often becomes the creator of its better moments. Silent influences, hidden providences, are at work in society of which the individual has no suspicion, and whose effects cannot be recorded in statistics. Below the plane of conscious recognition there are far-reaching movements of thought which transcend our powers of understanding, but which act with almost unbounded sway in controlling the thought and life of each person. The early promise is fulfilled in the ripening powers of the mind under the cumulative influences which nourish it from without. In the order which surrounds the individual, and in the movement of which he has become a part, we see, as clearly as in himself, the inevitable promise of his ultimate destiny.
In whatever pertains to liberal culture Boston is never weak or wavering. Boston impresses one as possessing innate respect and enthusiasm for intellectual supremacy, and reverence for the pure sentiments of religion as continuous forces in human life. For two and a half centuries it has been the wish and work of her most cultivated minds to give human thought and life the highest expression; and this has been done with monumental activity. In Boston, culture and religious piety have never been decadent; over and above the controversies and schisms and sectarian quarrels which from time to time have rent the churches, they have remained intact. In spite of the manifold currents of opposing tendencies, which now and then threaten to overwhelm cherished beliefs and to lift the world off its hinges, they remain essential elements in this city’s social life. They are stern present necessities, unwritten and immutable laws which she will not and cannot transgress. From the founding of the city by the “choice spirits” of the seventeenth century, they have retained their vitality and have been affirmed without doubt or debate. With the growing demands and maturity of her civilization she reiterates them as her loftiest and most sacred privileges, subject to no vicissitudes. With these primitive traits eternally vital, thought is quick, and intellectual enthusiasm spreads rapidly. Boston is always stirring with “new ideas” and with the passion for a broader ethical and religious development. The character and repute which she acquired in former days for literary taste, clerical influence, and the administration of religion are to-day influencing surrounding secularity and the hurrying concerns of daily life. They are animating every institution and ordinance, every supreme and exquisite medium of feeling, every revelation of truth and hope in the human mind. In this exhaustless tide of thought and aspiration, which we may accept as Boston’s native product, it is easy to interest the people and to unite them in any attempt for the good of mankind under the sanction of culture, benevolence, or religion.
But religion is felt to be Boston’s greatest need and glory. In this city of philosophy and poetry, art and business energy, religious faith and life have their proper place, and are invested with power and dignity. Fixed habit and traditional thought contribute, without doubt, to the need and sacredness of religion; yet its transcendent results are due to the permanent disposition of the people. They are the appropriate manifestation of a religious culture and spirit that are fitted for all time, the logic of truths born of religious intuitions working out in the most practical results. However universally certain religious beliefs are ignored, there is no disposition to put culture or philanthropy above the gospel, the school above the church, or to make the schoolmaster, the literary autocrat, or the princes of wealth take precedence of the preacher. The spirit of conventionalism reigns more or less in Boston’s religious life; yet religion makes an irresistible appeal to the understanding, the conscience, and the heart. Everything is compelled to bow to its influence and to feel its inspiration. Although our churches present various theological tendencies, from the stiffest orthodoxy to the freest rationalism and pantheism, and with creeds yet confessedly nowhere settled, reason never pronounces religion absurd; to it homage is accorded. It is still the deepest and holiest interest of man. We all have an elevated sense of its vast importance in the destiny of mankind. Its manifestations may change, but its spirit is ever the same. While edifices of towering magnificence, grand displays of musical talent, time-honored ordinances, and attractions for popular reverence are fashionable and full of beauty and significance, and, possibly, prudent means to stimulate our patronage and to save to the ranks of the churches the votaries of all that is artistic and refining and impressive, they are no sure sign that spiritual life is departing; they have their utility, they foster the higher interests of mind and heart. These symbols of religious faith are not the productions of cold, speculative reasoning, but the statement of truth wrought into the convictions of the devout and spiritually minded.
Guided by these facts we may assume that the man who distinguishes himself in Boston as a preacher is one to whom considerable interest attaches. Upon such a man, as upon all her citizens of rare attainments and peculiar personal excellence, she confers distinction.
The Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., who recently changed his residence and his ministry from Boston to New York, and whose successful work in the former city may be a prophecy of enduring honors in the latter, has thus distinguished himself and been rewarded.
When Mr. Savage came from the West to Boston, he came “as a stranger,” as I myself heard him say. For years he thought and walked and worked alone. He was unpopular, and he felt his unpopularity. All religious sects, even that of his own persuasion, were critical and sceptical. As a preacher he had fellowship nowhere. He was met as a preacher of unwelcome and unwholesome doctrines. But he came as one having a special dispensation, as the witness and repository of new truth, as the representative of no low and paltry type of the Christian ministry, but as a living testimony to the reality and power and excellency of religion and its institutions. He felt the difficulties with which he had to contend. They were manifold, subtle, and fraught with deepest peril to his ministry. Prejudices, precedents, and the theology of the schools—whose only merit seemed to be that it was smitten with a passion to reduce Christian doctrine to logical form—were arrayed in open hostility to him. He was met by the régime of ecclesiastical orders, by men who preached the Gospel according to established and venerable routine, and whose credentials, not their wisdom, were their only power. But although he felt himself to be a persona non grata,—another unpopular person to suffer for his beliefs,—he girded himself for earnest uncompromising warfare. He planted against every church his strongest batteries of criticism, satire, and sarcasm. He poured forth his thoughts in words that made men’s ears tingle, till the protestations of his adversaries fell from their lips with something of a hollow sound. Half preacher, half assassin, as he was thought to be, repudiating as offensive the doctrines of the Cross, and hating with every drop of his blood the general traditions and faith of the Church, he worked and awaited the day of his triumph. It came.
Boston is slow to recognize new prophets; yet religious belief of every kind is treated with gentleness and indulgence. The preachers of the city might regard Mr. Savage as a teacher of “positive error,” but they could not object to the hospitality of Boston, a citizen and preacher of which Mr. Savage became on the footing of democratic fraternity. By the free development of reason and the spread of intelligence Boston has become temperate and tolerant. She will not enslave the understanding or deny anyone one vestige of religious freedom. With her, religion is a practical and spiritual thing rather than a theoretic and ceremonial. The latter helps to stimulate the former to the fullest discharge of duty, but does not in itself constitute religion. The one comes by internal necessity, the other belongs to the sphere of outward operation, of inventive and enterprising minds. Religion is a living mode of thought sustained by personal character, and needs not ambitious terminology or supervision. Boston trusts her instincts, as Emerson has taught her, and asks only ample scope for the imperative working of her religious sentiment and the life of the heart.
Under these favoring conditions, by which Boston, like a mother, works out her own character in the spirit and life of her gifted men, the Rev. Mr. Savage was impelled onward in his daring enterprise. With stern fidelity Boston exercised a definite and pervasive influence on Mr. Savage’s mind. Although his religious thinking came upon the public like a new birth, he was only reiterating its progressive thought and the stout emphasis it placed on thinking out religion in intelligible terms and in all the breadth of its activities. Instrumental rather than absolute, Boston’s versatile and expansive thought furnished the new preacher his coveted opportunity. Her faith failed not, nor did her courage falter. Silently she was assailing the old theology and elaborating the new, in which she has unhesitating belief, and which entered with enlightening and nourishing force into Mr. Savage’s broad and free opinions. It came to him as the expression of the abiding atmosphere in which he dwelt and with a beneficent bearing on his ministry. Favored thus by the concurrent voices of those to whom he ministered, and by the general freedom and grace of the entire community, Mr. Savage made a real and salutary advance in his religious work in Boston. And supported by the judgment of an ever widening public, conservative thinkers about him felt his influence on current religious opinion. While he indulged a liberty of speculation, he instilled religious habits of thought and the spirit of worship into many inquiring minds, and enabled them to identify themselves with the highest development of his own religious consciousness. Boston and vicinity became fully appreciative of the distinctiveness of his mission and of his apprehensions of the truth. In recognition, therefore, of the unmeasured praise and enthusiastic acceptance which he received from the public, he was honored, at the close of his ministry in Boston, with the degree of Doctor of Divinity at Harvard University. Harvard thus expressed her highest confidence in the truth and permanence of his ministry. This famous institution of classic, scientific, philosophic, and sacred learning attested the sanity of the mind and doctrines of this once obscure and despised but now noted preacher.