Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

The difference between us is a difference of methods in accomplishing the same result. I think your method would overthrow the common school system, would overthrow the Republican Party, and would end by massing together all the Catholic voters, as proscription always does mass men together, to increase and strengthen that political power which you profess so much to dread.

When O'Neill, the young Catholic soldier of Worcester, lay dying, he said: "Write to my dear mother and tell her I die for my country. I wish I had two lives to give. Let the Union flag be wrapped around me and a fold of it laid under my head." I feel proud that God gave me such a man to be my countryman and townsman. I have very little respect for the Americanism that is not moved and stirred by such a story. If O'Neill had left a daughter who had her father's spirit, I would be willing to trust my child or grandchild to her instruction in secular education in the public school, even if the father had kissed with his last breath the cross on which the Saviour died, or even if the parting soul had received comfort from the lips of Thomas Conaty or John Power or John Ireland or Archbishop Williams.

When John Boyle O'Reilly, the Catholic poet, sang the praises of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, in that noblest of odes, when he quoted in his preface from William Bradford and John Robinson and Robert Cushman, I was glad to hear what he said, especially when he quoted from the lips of the clergyman Robinson: "I charge you before God that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow the Lord Jesus Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my ministry, for I am verily persuaded, I am very confident, the Lord hath more truths yet to break forth out of His Holy Word." I liked what he said. If I understand your former letter correctly, you didn't. That is where we differ. When John Boyle O'Reilly said, declaring the very spirit of New England Puritanism, and speaking of religious faith, "the one sacred revolution is change of mind," when he spoke these noble lines:

So held they firm, the Fathers aye to be,
From Home to Holland, Holland to the sea—
Pilgrims for manhood, in their little ship,
Hope in each heart, and prayer on every lip.
Apart from all—unique, unworldly, true,
Selected grain to sow the earth anew;
A winnowed part—a saving remnant they;
Dreamers who work; adventurers who pray!
We know them by the exile that was theirs;
Their justice, faith and fortitude attest.

When he further said:

On the wintry main
God flings their lives as farmers scatter grain,
His breath propels the winged seed afloat;
His tempests swerve to spare the fragile boat;
Here on this rock and on this sterile soil,
Began the kingdom, not of kings, but men;
Began the making of the world again,
Their primal code of liberty, their rules
Of civil right; their churches, courts and schools;
Their freedom's very secret here laid down—
The spring of government is the little town!
On their strong lines, we base our social health—
The man—the home—the town—the Commonwealth;
Their saintly Robinson was left behind
To teach by gentle memory; to shame
The bigot spirit and the word of flame;
To write dear mercy in the Pilgrim's law;
To lead to that wide faith his soul foresaw—

I liked what he said. If I understand your former letter, you didn't. You don't want a man who differs from you saying or thinking such things. I want the whole 700,000 Catholics of Massachusetts to believe what John Boyle O'Reilly believed, and to love and reverence the Puritan founders of Massachusetts as he did, and I think my way is the way to make them do it. You don't, if I understand you. You think the way to make good citizens and good men of them and to attract them to Protestantism, is to exclude them, their sons and daughters, from all public employment and to go yourself into a dark cellar and curse at them through the gratings of the windows.

I stated my religious faith and my ideas of the relation of our religious denominations to each other, in an address I delivered at Saratoga last year, of which I send you a copy, and which I hope, as you have kindly volunteered to send me so much of your opinion, you may perhaps be willing to read. It doesn't become me to say anything about it myself. I am deeply sensible of its imperfections. It fails to do justice to what is in my own heart. But perhaps I may be permitted to say that within a few weeks after it was delivered, an eminent Catholic clergyman sent me a message expressing his delight in it. The most famous Episcopalian Bishop in the country said to a friend of mine that he had read it with great pleasure and that it sounded to him like the old times. A Baptist minister, bearing one of the most distinguished names in the country, wrote me a letter, in which he said, as he read it, "At every sentence, I said to myself, Amen, Amen." An eminent Orthodox minister, Doctor of Divinity, read it aloud to his parish, in full, instead of his Sunday's sermon. And a very excellent and able Methodist minister wrote to me and said, "If that is Unitarianism, I am afraid I am a Unitarian." I think the time has come to throw down the walls between Christians and not to build new ones. I think the time has come to inculcate harmony and good will between all American citizens, especially between all citizens of the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

You quote some expressions which you attribute to Catholic clergymen. If you don't get any nearer right in quoting them than you do in quoting me, I don't believe that they ever said any such thing. If they have, they never will persuade any considerable number of Catholic laity in this country, in this nineteenth century, to follow them. You may perhaps induce the Catholic young men and women of Massachusetts to believe there is something in what those clergymen say. They never will succeed in doing it themselves.

I don't think you will succeed in getting any considerable number of the people of this country, who are able to read and write, or to count ten on their fingers, to believe that, as I am entering my seventieth year, I am actuated by any personal ambition, in the counsel which I give my fellow citizens. I don't think you will get them to believe that, if I were so actuated, I should begin by saying anything which would estrange a considerable number of the Protestant Republican citizens of Massachusetts. I don't think you will convince them that I am indifferent to the good will of so large a portion of the American people as are said to be enlisted in the ranks of the secret society to which you refer. If you know as little of your Catholic fellow citizens as you know of me, you have a good deal as yet to learn of the subject of which you are speaking.