American Men of Mind

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

It was a new idea which he presented to the public, met at first with indifference, then with ridicule and opposition. But as a bold worker in the streets of New York, by a relentless activity in carrying cases of ill-treatment of animals to the courts, and an eloquent advocacy of his cause on the floor of the legislature, he soon won friends and support, as every great cause is bound to do, and finally succeeded in so winning over public sentiment that, in 1866, the legislature passed the laws which he had prepared, creating the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, with himself as president. He gave not only his time, but his property to the work, and soon had the society in a prosperous condition, with branches forming in other cities. Indeed, the idea which he fostered has spread to the whole country, and nowhere may animals be mistreated with impunity. The idea that man is responsible not only for the happiness of his fellows, but for the well-being of his beasts marks a long stride forward in ethics.

Bergh's influence, indeed, extended beyond this country. Not only did practically every state in the Union enact the laws for the protection of animals which he had procured from the state of New York, but Brazil, the Argentine Republic, and many other foreign countries did likewise. In 1874, Bergh rescued a little girl from inhuman treatment, and this led to the formation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which has also done a great work.

No doubt before Bergh's time, there were many people who were pained to see either children or animals mistreated and who passed by with averted eyes. Bergh did not pass by. He made it his business, in the first place, to secure adequate laws for the punishment of cruelty, and in the second place, to provide means for the enforcement of those laws.

There are many of us to-day who are shocked at the injustice and suffering in the world, and who would welcome its regeneration. But wishing for a thing never got it. Nor does philanthropy consist merely in wishing men well. It means labor and self-sacrifice, and frequently obloquy and misunderstanding. The reward of the reformer is usually a stone and a sneer, if nothing worse. But when a man's heart is in the work, stones and sneers seem only to spur him on. They are like wind to a flame, fanning it white-hot. And it is a wonderful commentary on the essential goodness of human nature that never yet, in the history of mankind, has a real and needed reform failed, in the end, of success.

Among latter-day clergymen in America, none has achieved a wider reputation or a greater personal popularity than Phillips Brooks. Born in Boston in 1835, a graduate of Harvard, ordained to the Episcopal ministry at the age of twenty-four, and ten years later called to the rectorship of Trinity church, Boston, it was in this latter field, which he would never leave, that he showed himself to be one of the strongest personalities and noblest preachers of his age. No more striking figure ever appeared in a pulpit. Of magnificent physique, with a striking and massive head and handsome countenance, breathing the very spirit of youth, in spite of his grey hair, he had the interest and attention of any audience before he opened his lips.

Phillips Brooks has been compared to Henry Ward Beecher, and in many things they were alike. But the former's culture, while perhaps less varied than Beecher's, was deeper and richer, his sermons were less brilliant but cast in better form, his appeal was narrower but to a far more influential class. He was, in a word, the preacher of the intellectual. No one who heard him preach ever failed to be startled at first by his tremendous rapidity of delivery—averaging two hundred words a minute—or failed to find himself, at first, lagging behind the equal rapidity of thought. But once accustomed to these—once realizing that, in listening to him there could be no inattention or wandering of wits—his sermon became a source of keenest intellectual delight and noblest spiritual inspiration.

Phillips Brooks often said that he had to preach rapidly, or not at all. In youth he had suffered from something resembling an impediment in his speech, and more measured utterance gave it a chance to recur. Certainly, no one who ever listened to his fluent and limpid utterance would have suspected it. But he was far more than a great preacher. By his broad tolerance, his lofty character and immense personal influence, he became, in a way, a national figure, the common property of the nation which felt itself the richer for possessing him. A gracious and courtly figure, with a heart as wide as the human race, he lives, somehow, as the true type of clergyman, whose concern is humanity and whose field the world.

Which brings us to the life of the last man we shall consider in this chapter, a man the opposite in many ways of the great clergyman whose career we have just noted, and yet, like him, of broadest sympathies and most sincere convictions; a man whose life was more picturesque, whose battle against fate was harder, and whose achievement was even more remarkable—the greatest evangelist the modern world has ever produced, Dwight L. Moody. If ever a man labored for his fellow-men, he did, and the story of his life reads almost like a romance.

He was born at Northfield, Massachusetts, in 1837, the son of a stone-mason, who, disheartened and worn out by business reverses, died when the boy was only four years old. There were nine children, the oldest only fifteen, and when the father's creditors came and took every possession they had in the world, the future looked dark indeed. The mother was urged to place the children in various homes, but she managed to keep them together by doing housework for the neighbors and tilling a little garden.

As soon as he was old enough, Dwight was put to work on a farm, but his earnings were small, and finally, when he was seventeen, he started for Boston to look for something better. He managed to get a position in a shoe-store, and there came under the influence of Edward Kimball, who persuaded him to become a Christian and to join a church. But he was not admitted to membership for nearly a year; so poor was his command of language and so awkward his sentences that it was doubted if he understood Christianity at all, and even when he was admitted, the committee stated that they thought him "very unlikely ever to become a Christian of clear and decided views of gospel truth; still less to fill any extended sphere of public usefulness." How blind, indeed, we often are to the possibilities in human nature!