Of the genius of Dr. Buckley, it may be said, it is so all-embracing that it would be difficult to tell what he is not, in distinctive literary capacity. First of all certainly, he is a theologian, then editor, orator, scientist, traveler and so on among our classifications. One is led to apply to him the familiar saying that "he who does one thing well, can do all things well."
It is pleasant to note that a man of such keen observation and well balanced judgment as Dr. Buckley, after extensive travel in our own country and abroad can state, as many of us have heard him, that, of all the beautiful spots he has seen in one country and another, none is so beautiful, so attractive and so desirable, in every respect, as Morristown.
Dr. Buckley is a true Jerseyman, for he was born in Rahway, N. J., and educated at Pennington, N. J. Seminary. He studied theology, after one year at Wesleyan University, at Exeter, N. H., and joined the New Hampshire Methodist Episcopal Conference on trial, being stationed at Dover in that state. In 1864 he went to Detroit and in 1866 to Brooklyn, N. Y. In 1881, he was elected to the Methodist Ecumenical Conference in London and also in that year was elected editor of the New York Christian Advocate, which position he has held to the present time. The degree of D. D. was conferred upon him by Wesleyan University in 1872 and LL. D. by Emory and Henry College, Virginia.
As a traveler, Dr. Buckley is represented by his work on "The Midnight Sun and the Tsar and the Nihilist" being a book of "Adventures and Observations in Norway, Sweden and Russia". This book is full as we might expect of information communicated in the most entertaining manner, full of very graphic descriptions, original comments, spices of humor, with a clever analysis of the people and conditions of life around the author—all of which characteristics give us a feeling that we are making with him this tour of observation. In the chapters on "St. Petersburg" and "Holy Moscow", we see these qualities especially evidenced. Here is a short paragraph quite representative of the author, who is writing of the Cathedral of the Assumption, Moscow, an immense building in the Byzantine style of architecture, in which a service of the Greek church is going on:
"The monks sang magnificently, but there was not a face among them that exhibited anything but the most profound indifference. Some of the young monks fixed their eyes upon the ladies who accompanied me from the hotel, and kept them there even while they were singing the prayers, which they appeared to repeat like parrots, without any internal consciousness or recognition of the meaning of the words, but in most melodious tones." Again, the author visits a Tartar Mosque where he and his party are told "with oriental courtesy, that they may be permitted to remain outside the door, looking in, while the service progresses:
"Here," he says, "I was brought for the first time in direct contact with that extraordinary system of religion which, without an idol, an image, or a picture, holds one hundred and seventy million of the human race in absolute subjection, and whose power, after the lapse of twelve hundred years, is as great as at the beginning."
Of the summoning of the people to prayers from the minaret, he writes:
"Dr. J. H. Vincent for many years employed at Chatauqua the late A. O. Van Lennep, who went upon the summit of a house at evening time, dressed in the Turkish costume, and called the people to prayer.
"I supposed when I heard him that he was over-doing the matter as respects the excruciating tones and variations of voice which he employed, or else he had an extraordinary qualification for making hideous sounds, whereby he out-Turked the Turks, and sometimes considered whether Dr. Vincent did not deserve to be expostulated with for allowing such frightful noises to clash with the ordinary sweet accords of Chatauqua. Worthy Mr. Van Lennep will never appear there again, but I am able to vindicate him from such unworthy suspicion as I cherished. He did his best to produce the worst sounds he could, but his worst was not bad enough to equal the reality. With his hands on his ears, the Mohammedan priest of the great mosque of Moscow emitted, for the space of seven minutes or thereabouts, a series of tones for which I could find no analogy in anything I had ever heard of the human voice. There seemed occasionally a resemblance to the smothered cries of a cat in an ash-hole; again to the mournful wail of a hound tied behind a barn; and again to the distant echo of a tin horn on a canal-boat in a section where the canal cuts between the mountains. The reader may think this extravagant, but it is not, and he will ascertain if ever he hears the like."
Dr. Buckley's published writings are, besides his great work as editor of The Christian Advocate, in editorials and in many directions,—and besides the book we have already mentioned, "The Midnight Sun, the Tsar and the Nihilist"; "Oats versus Wild Oats"; "Christians and the Theatre"; "Supposed Miracles", and "Faith Healing, Christian Science, and Kindred Phenomena", published quite recently (in October, 1892). Among magazine articles, may be especially mentioned "Two Weeks in the Yosemite", and in pamphlet form have appeared some letters worthy of mention, about "A Hereditary Consumptive's Successful Battle for Life".