Might not this principle be adopted to advantage by many a modern clergyman?
It was in a rough-shod manner, regardless of obstacles, that Doctor Hawes plowed his way through life. He did not know how to compromise. Tact, adaptability, adjustment, finesse,—these words were not included in his vocabulary. He paid little attention to the amenities of existence, but went directly to his object, as on the occasion when in prayer meeting, after lamenting the fact that ordinarily only a few persons took active part in these gatherings, he suddenly called upon one diffident attendant, whose voice had never been heard, with the peremptory request, "Brother Jones, will you lead us in prayer—and we won't take any excuse."
He spoke the plain truth as he saw it, regardless of whether it was appropriate, or sometimes whether it hurt. A distinguished lawyer, no longer living, once told the writer that when he was a small boy the doctor met him one day in the street, stopped him, put his hand on his head, and, after gazing intently at him for so long that the child became rather frightened, at last ejaculated, "Charles, you remind me so much of your grandfather—he was a hard-featur'd man!"
This absolute sincerity, this disdain of any pretense or artificiality, this almost childlike naïveté, while they furnished many amusing and sometimes embarrassing incidents, had no small part in endearing the good man in the hearts of his people. Indeed the significant thing about the numerous anecdotes of him that are still occasionally quoted is that while so many of them turn on his peculiarities and eccentricities, none of them seems to detract from the affection and esteem in which the man and his memory are held in the traditions of his church. Doubtless the reason is that these stories essentially serve to delineate and illumine the portrait of an intensely earnest, able and vigorous servant of God and his fellow men.
His humor was not all unconscious. He had his own notions of the incongruous and diverting. On one of his journeys abroad he wrote of the tombs in Westminster Abby—"There lie in promiscuous assemblage kings, queens, statesmen, warriors, poets, scholars, prostitutes, and villains, each, by his epitaph, now in heaven, but all awaiting the decisions of the last day, which, in a great majority of cases, will, it cannot be doubted, reverse forever the judgment of man."
There was, too, another side to him. Hidden in the uncouth body was a kindly and sympathetic heart. Children, at first awed and possibly repelled by his appearance and manners, soon grew to love him. His biographer quotes him as saying that he could never go past a hand-organ in the street without stopping to listen with the children and see the monkey.
Sorrow and suffering found in him an instant response and the instinctive impulse to comfort and help. Generally these traits, while partly inherent, are emphasized and made of value to others, as well as to one's self, by experience. Doctor Hawes's life had its tragic sorrows and these were translated into a singular ability to comfort and help. Then, too, while he would never compromise for an instant with temptation, weakness and sin, he could understand. As in the case of most forceful, passionate natures, his early days, before he discovered the Bible, had their period of wildness, brief though it was. In the practical conduct of life he was no theorist, no amateur. He had struggled against poverty and loneliness, as he had fought and conquered the devil in his own life, and he recognized his old adversary and knew how to deal with him when he saw the fight going on in the experience of others.
Perhaps it was all this as much as anything that constituted the foundation for his interest in the youth of his church and city. In 1827 this interest resulted in a series of "Lectures to Young Men" delivered on successive Sunday evenings to crowded and enthusiastic assemblies in his own church, and later repeated at Yale College where subsequently he became a member of the corporation. The following year the lectures were published "at the united request" of his hearers and instantly became famous. "Few books," says Doctor Walker in his history of the First Church, "attained a like circulation." Nearly a hundred thousand copies, in various editions, were issued in this country and more in Great Britain. One Scotch publisher alone, asserts Doctor Walker, printed fifty thousand copies.
Reading these lectures today, nearly a century after their composition, one is impressed by the fact that here is a compendium, as valuable now as at the time of delivery, of practical rules for a good and useful life. The titles of the five original addresses indicate the subject matter—"Claims of Society on Young Men;" "Dangers of Young Men;" "Importance of Established Principles;" "Formation and Importance of Character;" "Religion the Chief Concern."
The lectures deal with plain, fundamental truths, in a straightforward business-like way. There is as little ornament as imagination about them; they have more vigor than originality, but they are bristling with common sense and set forth with tremendous earnestness the principles of a practical Christian philosopher. Epigrammatic touches, indeed, are not wanting. "A lover of good books," says the lecturer, "can never be in want of good society;" and again, "He who cares not for others will soon find that others will not care for him." "The Gospel may be neglected," he asserts, "but it cannot be understandingly disbelieved." "Character is power; character is influence," he says, "and he who has character, though he may have nothing else, has the means of being eminently useful, not only to his immediate friends, but to society, to the church of God, and to the world."