Calvin Wilson Mateer, forty-five years a missionary in Shantung, China

by D. W. Fisher

At the time of Calvin’s birth his parents were living in a frame house which is still standing; and though, with the passing of years, it has much deteriorated, it gives evidence that it was a comfortable though modest home for the little family.

One of the employments of his father while resident there was the running of a water mill for hulling clover seed; and Calvin tells somewhere of a recollection that he used to wish when a very little boy that he were tall enough to reach a lever by which he could turn on more water to make the mill go faster,—a childish anticipation of his remarkable mechanical ability and versatility in maturer years.

Calvin was the oldest of seven children—five brothers and two sisters; in the order of age, Calvin Wilson, Jennie, William Diven, John Lowrie, Robert McCheyne, Horace Nelson and Lillian, of whom Jennie, William, Robert and Horace are still living. Of these seven children, Calvin and Robert became ministers of the gospel in the Presbyterian Church, and missionaries in Shantung, China; John for five years had charge of the Presbyterian Mission Press at Shanghai, and later of the Congregational Press at Peking, where he died; Lillian taught in the Girls’ School at Tengchow, and, after her marriage to Rev. William S. Walker, of the Southern Baptist Mission, in the school at Shanghai, until the failing health of her husband compelled her to return to the United States; William for a good while was strongly disposed to offer himself for the foreign missionary service, and reluctantly acting on advice, turned from it to business. Jennie married an exceptionally promising young Presbyterian minister, and both offered themselves to the foreign work and were under appointment to go to China when health considerations compelled them to remain in their homeland. Some years after his death she married a college professor of fine ability. Horace is a professor in the University of Wooster, and a practicing physician.

In view of this very condensed account of the remarkable life and work of the children in this household, one may well crave to know more about the parents, and about the home life in the atmosphere of which they were nurtured. Their father and mother both had the elementary education which could be furnished in their youth by the rural schools during the brief terms for which they were held each year. In addition, the mother attended a select school in Harrisburg for a time. Both father and mother built well on this early foundation, forming the habit of wise, careful reading. Both were professing Christians when they were married, and in infancy Calvin was baptized in the old Silver Spring Church, near which they resided. Later the father became a ruling elder in the Presbyterian church to which they had removed their membership. In this capacity he was highly esteemed, his pastor relying especially on his just, discerning judgment. He had a beautiful tenor voice and a line musical sense, and he led the choir for a number of years. Few laymen in the church at large were better informed as to its doctrines and history, and few were more familiar with the Bible. There was in the church a library from which books were regularly brought home; religious papers were taken and read by the whole family, and thus all were acquainted with the current news of the churches, and with the progress of the gospel in the world.

In the conduct of his farm Mr. Mateer was thrifty, industrious and economical. His land did not yield very bountifully, but all of its products were so well husbanded that notwithstanding the size of his family he yet accumulated considerable property. Though somewhat reluctant at first to have his boys one after another leave him, thus depriving him of their help on the farm, he aided each to the extent of his ability, and as they successively fitted themselves for larger lives he rejoiced in their achievements.

Mr. Mateer died at Monmouth, Illinois, in 1875. When the tidings reached Calvin out in China, he wrote home to his mother a beautiful letter, in which among other things he said: “Father’s death was eminently characteristic of his life—modest, quiet and self-suppressed. He died the death of the righteous and has gone to a righteous man’s reward. The message he sent John and me was not necessary; that he should ‘die trusting in Jesus’ was not news to us, for we knew how he had lived.”

DR. MATEER’S MOTHER

By reading the records that have been at my command I have gotten the conviction that the mother was the stronger character, or at least that she more deeply impressed herself on the children. When Calvin made his last visit to this country, he was asked whose influence had been most potent in his life, and he at once replied, “Mother’s.” In his personal appearance he strongly resembled her. If one could have wished for any change in his character, it might have been that he should have had in it just a little bit more of the ideality of his father, and just a little bit less of the intense realism of his mother. Some of his mother’s most evident characteristics were in a measure traceable as an inheritance from her father, William Diven; for example, the place to which she assigned education among the values of life. He was a man of considerable literary attainments, for his day, and for one residing out in the country; so that when in later years he came to make his home with the Mateers he brought with him a collection of standard books, thus furnishing additional and substantial reading for the family. Even Shakspere and Burns were among the authors, though they were not placed where the children could have access to them, and were made familiar to them only by the grandfather’s quotation of choice passages. When his daughter was a little girl, so intense was his desire that she should have as good an education as practicable, that if the weather was too inclement for her to walk to the schoolhouse he used to carry her on his back. It was her lifelong regret that her education was so defective; and it is said that after she was seventy years of age, once she dreamed that she was sent to school at Mount Holyoke, and she awoke in tears to find that she was white-haired, and that it was only a dream. Although it involved the sacrifice of her own strength and ease, she never faltered in her determination that her children should have the educational advantages to which she had aspired, but never attained; and in what they reached in this direction she had a rich satisfaction. Toward every other object which she conceived to be good and true, and to be within the scope of her life, she set herself with like persistence, and strength, and willingness for self-sacrifice. Her piety was deep, thorough and all-controlling; but with her it was a principle rather than a sentiment. Its chief aim was the promotion of the glory of the infinitely holy God, though as she neared the visible presence of her Saviour, this softened somewhat into a conscious love and faith toward him. She survived her husband twenty-one years, and died at the advanced age of seventy-nine. When the tidings of this came to her children in China, their chief lament was, “How we shall miss her prayers!”

When Calvin was about five years old, his parents bought a farm twelve miles north of Gettysburg, near what is now York Springs, in Adams County. It is some twenty miles from the place of his birth, and beyond the limits of the Cumberland valley. Even now it is a comparatively out-of-the-way spot, reached only by a long drive from the nearest railway station; then it was so secluded that the Mateers called the house into which they removed the “Hermitage.” Here the family continued to reside until about the time of Calvin’s graduation from college. Then a second and much longer move was made, to Mercer County, in western Pennsylvania. Still later, a third migration brought them to Illinois. It is to the home in Adams County that Calvin refers in the line quoted at the head of this chapter, as the place where “were all the fond recollections and associations” of his youth.