Letters of Asa Gray; Vol. 1

by Asa Gray

TO JOHN TORREY.

Cambridge, 25th March, [1844].

I think I should be an unhappy, discontented, unthankful person not to be gratified with the success of my lectures. But it is not likely to turn my head. Everything proceeds quietly and soberly. I purposely directed no tickets to be sent to a paper that often reports lectures, as I did not wish it done. There has not been a line in the papers about the matter, except the very considerate notice about the beginning, which I sent you. My last week’s lectures are called much the best. The first, on the anatomy and physiology of leaves, and exhalation and its consequences, occupied an hour and twenty minutes. My last, on food of plants, vegetable digestion, and the relations of plants to mineral and animal kingdoms,—in which I did my very best, and which required and secured the most intense attention on the part of the audience for a hundred minutes,—was received with an intelligent enthusiasm which did the audience credit. For it would be mere affectation for me to pretend not to know—as I well do—that it is one of the best scientific lectures that have ever been delivered in Boston. I have none left to compare with it. I have only four more to give, during which I dare say the interest will fall off; which will not disappoint or mortify me. From your truly kind remarks and warnings I suppose you look upon my success in this undertaking as extremely hazardous to my best interests. Now this duty came to me unsolicited and unexpected. I accepted it because I thought it was my duty to do so. Then I was of course bound to make every consistent effort to insure success. While viewing it at a distance, I felt much anxiety. But before I commenced, this entirely disappeared, and I have gone on just as coolly as you might do with your chemical course. I am thankful that (owing chiefly to the nature and novelty of the subject) I have done my work creditably. The little éclat which attends it, I am not so foolish as to care anything for, pro or con. It is entirely ephemeral. It may gratify my friends; but it does me no good, and I trust no harm. The general result may benefit the science of this part of the country. It will probably tend to advance my interests, as I certainly wish it may, the object of my ambition being high and honorable, as well as moderate....

Though I feel that I often—always—fail to do my whole duty, yet I do not feel, nor believe, that a perfectly consistent Christian course would expose me to persecution; nor that obloquy is a test of Christian character. These are to be borne like other evils, when they are incurred in the course of one’s duty; but surely they are not to be sought, nor viewed as a test. Under the circumstances under which we are placed, would our unexpectedly meeting with obloquy be any test to us that we were doing right? Would it not lead us to suspect we had been at least unwise? Such men as Payson or Edwards, though they may often have been pitied, I suspect, were never persecuted. But, while I think you take a one-sided view and assume, an unscriptural test, in your own case, I thank you most sincerely for your kind admonition to me, and will try to profit by it. My sheet is fairly full.

I need not say how delighted I should be to see you here; but you must not come till the spring has fairly commenced, at least. The weather is excessively unpleasant, the roads almost impassable; it snows every three or four days, and not a speck of green is yet to be seen. A month later it will be comfortable here. I fear I shall not have a place to receive you before autumn, as a house is yet to be built for Dr. Walker. But I should still like to have a visit from you in the course of the summer.

Dr. Gray was always deeply interested in the religious thought of the day; reticent in regard to his own religious feelings and sensitive about any exhibition of them, he was ready at any time to discuss problems of theology and ecclesiasticism. His temper was naturally conservative, and he held by the habits of thought which had been early formed; but he was open to conviction, and by the process of his own thought broke through narrow bounds and rejoiced in all true progress in religion, both for himself and others. In the matter of scriptural authority, for example, he was in accord with Soame Jenyns, taking the ground quoted here:

“The Scriptures,” says that writer, in his “Internal Evidences of Christianity,” “are not revelations from God, but the history of them. The revelations themselves are derived from God, but the history of them is the production of man. If the records of this revelation are supposed to be the revelation itself, the least defect discovered in them must be fatal to the whole. What has led many to overlook this distinction is that common phrase that the Scriptures are the Word of God; and in one sense they certainly are; that is, they are the sacred repository of all the revelations, dispensations, promises, and precepts which God has vouchsafed to communicate to mankind; but by this expression we are not to understand that every part of this voluminous collection of historical, poetical, prophetical, theological, and moral writing which we call the Bible was dictated by the immediate influence of Divine inspiration.”

He held this ground strongly when the general view of the Bible was narrower than of late years. As the years went on he grew broader and sweeter, feeling wider sympathy with all true, devout religious belief.

He was a constant church-goer, everywhere. When traveling he always made Sunday a resting-day if possible, and would go quietly off in the morning to find some place of service, in English if he could. He enjoyed the Episcopal service, though early habit and training had made him a Presbyterian; but, as he wrote in an early letter, “In fact I have no more fondness for high Calvinistic theology than for German neology.... But I have no penchant for melancholy, sober as I sometimes look, but turn always, like the leaves, my face to the sun.”

He was a teacher in Sunday-schools in New York (the lady with whom he boarded has still a lively remembrance of his enthusiastic study of German that he might teach his class of German boys better), and also in his early years of Cambridge life, until the heavy load of work he was carrying made the Sunday more imperative as a day of rest. It was his rule to rest on Sunday. Rest for him was change of intellectual occupation, and he read all of the day he was not out at church; more especially on the philosophical questions, whether general or scientific, which next to botany were his chief interest. Books on these subjects were the few he bought outside of works on botany; as he said, he could only afford botanical books and had no money or room for general literature. He read the leading magazines, and occasionally biographies and travels, and if he had friends staying with him, Sunday was the day for talk and discussion. A friend writes such a lively reminiscence of one of these Sunday discussions, on a stormy winter day which shut all in the house, that it seems worth giving as a vivid description of him.