DR. SMART AT COLLEGE ST. CHURCH AT THE FUNERAL OF MR. PUTNEY
It takes a man to adorn any calling; callings require or bring special fitness, but manhood crowns the fitness, gives it added scope, completeness, power and beauty—rejoicing the heart. Good doctors, good lawyers, good men of affairs, good teachers, are better if they are beyond reckoning. Wisdom is an intellectual thing, a property of the mind, but when it is perfect the heart pours through it as the rivers flowed through paradise. A poem in the Scriptures says that Wisdom created the world, not as a task, but as a pastime. Speaking of God, Wisdom says, "I was daily his delight, sporting before him, sporting in his habitable earth." When one sees a man investing his work with personal charm, one knows the difference between a photograph and a painting—a photograph with its hard, incisive fidelities, and a painting with its living colors, its appeal to feeling, its lovely beauty, something luxuriously human in it. A teacher has a special reason for floating his service, if it may be, upon a stream of personal worth and personal charm, because he deals with children and youth who respond to what he is, as well as to what he teaches. Daniel says, "The teachers shall shine as the stars." Our friend here had much of the oak, much of the granite in his make-up; something also of the morning scattered upon the hills, something of the son of consolation. He mellowed with the years. He planted climbing roses beside his strength, and in the heart of it a tender and delicate consideration; some of you loved him more and more to the end.
In his early youth he had the happy fortune to serve his country during the Civil War. The ardors of that crisis glowed in his heart to the end; the scorching heat gone, the flashing lightning gone, but never the remaining glory of those years when he ennobled his young manhood by risking his life for his country. He might have said what Galahad said of the Holy Grail,
"... Never yet
Hath ...
This Holy thing fail'd from my side nor come
Covered, but moving with me night and day."
He was a faithful member of Stannard Post, and long its commander. He kept the Friday night of the Post meeting for the Post. Every Sunday afternoon he passed my house, going to visit a comrade whom illness kept at home. And he was a religious man—a Christian man. Faith was mixed with his life. God strengthened him with strength in his soul. He was a deacon of this church, and while his strength permitted, a teacher in the Sunday school. He lived by his faith, and he thought about it. It was one of the great interests of his mind. There is plenty in every man's experience to limit him, to confine him, to make him small and petty. This man had at least two enthusiasms which lifted and broadened his spirit, his patriotism and his religion. The last word he spoke was the name of his native town in New Hampshire, Bow. A great light came into his eyes with the name, as if he saw the place in a vision. He loved his old home and visited it when he could. He went back at last in imagination and desire to the roothold of his life, and that was well and fair, for he represented the fineness of that New England inheritance. One perhaps should not boast, but at least one may say that it is a goodly inheritance of solidity, fidelity, seriousness, fitness to live in a community and take part in its affairs.
It is said of Elisha that he took up the mantle of Elijah. The mantle was a symbol of the spirit; it had become almost a personal thing. Elijah had wrapped his face in it when he stood in the cave's mouth and heard the small, still voice of the Lord. He cast it upon Elisha when he called him from his plow to be a prophet. He smote the waters with it, when he went to the place where he was to go up in the whirlwind, and they were divided hither and thither so that they went over on dry ground. When he went up in the storm, his mantle fell on Elisha. That mantle lay close to the secrets of the prophet's heart; he wrapped his face in it when God spoke to him. It was the symbol of his influence; he called Elisha with it. It was the symbol of his power; he divided the waters with it. A mantle lies upon the shoulders. It may fit another as well as its owner. If it could be said that the mantle of this man has fallen upon the teachers of Burlington, he would need, he could desire, no other memorial.