The class of 1857 has always been proud of itself, and not without reason. Fifty-eight of us received our diplomas on commencement. Among them were such leaders in the church as George P. Hays, David C. Marquis and Samuel J. Niccolls, all of whom have been Moderators of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. In the law, S. C. T. Dodd, for many years the principal solicitor of the Standard Oil Company, stands out most conspicuously. Three of our number have served for longer or shorter periods as college presidents. Of Doctors of Divinity we have a long list, and also a goodly number of Doctors of Law; and others, though they have received less recognition for their work, have in our judgment escaped only because the world does not always know the worth of quiet lives. To spend years in the associations of such a class in college is itself an efficient means of education. It is a high tribute to the ability and the diligence of Mateer that, although he was with us only two years, he divided the first honor. The sharer with him in this distinction was the youngest member of the class, but a man who, in addition to unusual capacity, also had enjoyed the best preparation for college then available. On the part of Mateer, it was not what is known as genius that won the honor; it was a combination of solid intellectual capacity, with hard, constant work. The faculty assigned him the valedictory, the highest distinction at graduation, but on his own solicitation, this was given to the other first honor man.
In a letter sent by him from Wei Hsien, China, September 4, 1907, in answer to a message addressed to him by the little remnant of his classmates who assembled at Canonsburg a couple of months earlier, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their graduation, he said:
It was with very peculiar feelings of pleasure mingled with sadness that I read what was done by you at your meeting. The distance that separated me from you all adds a peculiar emphasis to my feelings, suggestive of loneliness. I have never been homesick in China. I would not be elsewhere than where I am, nor doing any other work than what I am doing. Yet when I read over the account of that meeting in Canonsburg my feelings were such as I have rarely had before. Separated by half the circumference of the globe for full forty-four years, yet in the retrospect the friendship formed in these years of fellowship in study seems to grow fresher and stronger as our numbers grow less. A busy life gives little time for retrospection, yet I often think of college days and college friends. Very few things in my early life have preserved their impression so well. I can still repeat the roll of our class, and I remember well how we sat in that old recitation room of Professor Jones [physics and chemistry]. I am in the second half of my seventy-second year, strong and well. China has agreed with me. I have spent my life itinerating, teaching and translating, with chief strength on teaching. But with us all who are left, the meridian of life is past, and the evening draws on. Yet a few of us have still some work to do. Let us strive to do it well, and add what we can to the aggregate achievement of the class’s life work—a record of which I trust none of us may be ashamed.
In the unanticipated privilege of writing this book I am trying to fulfill that wish of our revered classmate.
III
FINDING HIS LIFE WORK
“From my youth I had the missionary work before me as a dim vision. A half-formed resolution was all the while in my mind, though I spoke of it to no one. But for this it is questionable whether I would have given up teaching to go to the Seminary. After long consideration and many prayers I offered myself to the Board, and was accepted.”—AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH for college class anniversary, 1897.
In the four sentences at the head of this chapter we have a condensed outline of the process by which Calvin Mateer came to be a foreign missionary. In his case it did not, as in the antecedent experience of most other clergymen who have given themselves to this work, start with an attraction first toward the ministry, and then toward the missionary service; but just the reverse. In order to understand this we need to go back again to “the old home,” and especially to his mother. We are fortunate here in having the veil of the past lifted by Mrs. Kirkwood, as one outside of the family could not do, or, even if he could, would hesitate to do.
Long before her marriage, when indeed but a young girl, Mary Nelson Diven [Calvin’s mother] heard an appeal for the Sandwich Islands made by the elder Dr. Forbes, one of the early missionaries of the American Board, to those islands. He asked for a box of supplies. There was not much missionary interest in the little church of Dillsburg, York County, Pennsylvania, of which she was a member; for the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions had not been organized, and the American Board had not attained its majority. Her pastor sympathized with the newly awakened zeal and interest of his young parishioner, when she proposed to canvass the congregation in response to Dr. Forbes’s appeal. The box was secured and sent. This was the seed that germinated in her heart so early and bore fruit through the whole of her long life.
When in her nineteenth year she was married to John Mateer, hers was a marriage in the Lord; and together she and her husband consecrated their children in their infancy to his service. This consecration was not a form; they were laid upon the altar and never taken back. Through all the self-denying struggles to secure their education, one aim was steadily kept in view, that of fitting them either to carry the gospel to some heathen land, or to do the Lord’s work in their own land.