Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White — Volume 2

by Andrew Dickson White

Although he was the son of an honored Massachusetts family, a graduate of Harvard, a disciple of Channing, a man of sincere character and elegant manners, he was evidently dreaded by the great majority of the orthodox Christians about him. I remember speaking to him once of a clergyman who had recently arrived in Syracuse, and who was an excellent scholar. Said Mr. May to me, "I should like to know him, if that were possible." I asked, "Why not call upon him?" He answered, "I would gladly do so, but do you suppose he would return my call?" "Of course he would," I replied; "he is a gentleman." "Yes," said Mr. May, "no doubt he is, and so are the other clergymen; yet I have called on them as they have come, and only two or three of them all have ever entered my house since." Orthodox fanatics came to remonstrate and pray with him, but these he generally overcame with his sweet and kindly manner. To slavery he was an uncompromising foe, being closely associated with Garrison, Phillips, and the leaders of the antislavery movement; and so I came to see that there was a side to Christianity not necessarily friendly to slavery: but I also saw that it was a side not welcomed by the churches in general, and especially distrusted in my own family. I remember taking to him once an old friend of mine, a man of most severe orthodoxy; and after we had left Mr. May's house I asked my friend what he thought of the kindly heretic. He answered, "Those of us who shall be so fortunate as to reach heaven are to be greatly surprised at some of the people we are to meet there."

As a Yale student I found an additional advantage in the fact that I could now frequently hear distinguished clergymen who were more or less outside the orthodox pale. Of these were the liberal Congregationalists of New York, Brooklyn, and Boston, and, above all, Henry Ward Beecher, Edwin Chapin, and Theodore Parker. At various times during my college course I visited Boston, and was taken by my classmate and old friend George Washburn Smalley to hear Parker. He drew immense crowds of thoughtful people. The music-hall, where he spoke, contained about four thousand seats, and at each visit of mine every seat, so far as I could see, was filled. Both Parker's prayers and sermons were inspiring. He was a deeply religious man; probably the most thorough American scholar, orthodox or unorthodox, of his time; devoted to the public good and an intense hater of slavery. His influence over my thinking was, I believe, excellent; his books, and those of Channing which I read at this time, did me great good by checking all inclination to cynicism and scoffing; more than any other person he strengthened my theistic ideas and stopped any tendency to atheism; the intense conviction with which men like Channing, Parker, and May spoke of a God in the universe gave a direction to my thinking which has never been lost.

As to Beecher, nothing could exceed his bold brilliancy. He was a man of genius; even more a poet than an orator; in sympathy with every noble cause; and utterly without fear of the pew-holders inside his church or of the mob outside. Heresy-hunters did not daunt him. Humor played over much of his sermonizing; wit coruscated through it; but there was at times a pathos which pervaded the deep places of the human heart. By virtue of his poetic insight he sounded depths of thought and feeling which no mere theological reasoning could ever reach. He was a man,—indeed, a great man,—but to the end of his life he retained the freshness of youth. General Grant, who greatly admired him, once said to me, "Beecher is a boy—a glorious boy."

Beecher's love of nature was a passion. During one of his visits to Cornell University, I was driving through the woods with him, and he was in the full tide of brilliant discourse when, suddenly, he grasped my hand which held the reins and said peremptorily, "Stop!" I obeyed, and all was still save the note of a bird in the neighboring thicket. Our stop and silence lasted perhaps five minutes, when he said, "Did you hear that bird? That is the——(giving a name I have forgotten). You are lucky to have him here; I would give a hundred dollars to have him nest as near me."

During this visit of his to my house, I remember finding, one morning, that he had been out of doors since daylight; and on my expressing surprise at his rising so early after sitting up so late, he said, "I wanted to enjoy the squirrels in your trees."

Wonderful, too, was his facility, not merely in preaching, but in thinking. When, on another visit, he stayed with me, he took no thought regarding his sermon at the university chapel, so far as one could see. Every waking moment was filled with things which apparently made preparation for preaching impossible. I became somewhat nervous over this neglect; for, so far as I could learn, he had nothing written, he never spoke from memory, and not only the students, but the people from the whole country round about, were crowding toward the chapel.

Up to the last moment before leaving my house for the morning service, he discussed the best shrubs for planting throughout our groves and woods, and the best grasses to use in getting a good turf upon the university grounds. But, on leaving the house, he became silent and walked slowly, his eyes fixed steadily on the ground; and as I took it for granted that he was collecting his thoughts for his sermon, I was careful not to disturb him. As we reached the chapel porch, a vast crowd in waiting and the organ pealing, he suddenly stopped, turned round, lifted his eyes from the ground, and said, "I have been studying your lawn all the way down here; what you need is to sow Kentucky blue-grass." Then he entered the chapel, and shortly was in the midst of a sermon evidently suggested by the occasion, his whole manuscript being a few pencilings on a sheet or two of note-paper, all the rest being extemporized in his best vein, both as to matter and manner.

Chapin, too, was brilliant and gifted, but very different in every respect from Beecher. His way was to read from manuscript, and then, from time to time, to rise out of it and soar above it, speaking always forcibly and often eloquently. His gift of presenting figures of speech so that they became vivid realities to his audience was beyond that of any other preacher I ever heard. Giving once a temperance address, and answering the argument as to the loss of property involved in the confiscation of intoxicants, he suddenly pictured a balance let down from the hand of the Almighty, in one scale all the lucre lost, in the other all the crimes, the wrecks, the miseries, the sorrows, the griefs, the widows' groans and orphans' tears,—until we absolutely seemed to have the whole vast, terrific mass swaying in mid-air before us.

On another occasion, preaching from the text, "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face," he presented the picture of a man in his last illness, seeing dimly, through a half-transparent medium, the faint, dim outline of the Divinity whom he was so rapidly nearing; and then, suddenly, death,—the shattering of the glass,—and the man, on the instant, standing before his Maker and seeing him "face to face." It all seems poor when put upon paper; but, as he gave it, nothing could be more vivid. We seemed to hear the sudden crash of the translucent sheet, and to look full into the face of the Almighty looming up before us.

Chapin was a Universalist, and his most interesting parishioner was Horace Greeley, whose humanitarian ideas naturally inclined him to a very mild creed. As young men, strangers to the congregation, were usually shown to seats just in front of the pulpit, I could easily see Mr. Greeley in his pew on a side aisle, just behind the front row. He generally stalked in rather early, the pockets of his long white coat filled with newspapers, and, immediately on taking his seat, went to sleep. As soon as service began he awoke, looked first to see how many vacant places were in the pew, and then, without a word, put out his long arm into the aisle and with one or two vigorous scoops pulled in a sufficient number of strangers standing there to fill all the vacancies; then—he slept again. Indeed, he slept through most of the written parts of Dr. Chapin's sermons; but whenever there came anything eloquent or especially thoughtful, Greeley's eyes were wide open and fixed upon the preacher.