I had the pleasure of twice hearing Dr. Hedge's admirable essay on "Luther," which he first delivered at Arlington Street Church, and repeated, some years later, before the Town and Country Club of Newport, R. I. But my crowning recollection of him, and perhaps of the crowning performance of his life, is of that memorable evening of anniversary week in the year 1886, when he made his exhaustive and splendid statement of the substance of the Unitarian faith. The occasion was a happy one. The Music Hall was filled with the great Unitarian audience furnished by Boston and its vicinity. George William Curtis was the president of the evening, and introduced the several speakers with his accustomed grace. He made some little pun on Dr. Hedge's name, and the noble speaker quietly stepped forward, with the fire of unquenchable youth in his eyes, with the balance and reserve of power in every word, in every gesture. No note nor scrap of paper did he hold in his hand. None did he need, for he spoke of that upon which his whole life had been founded and built. Every one of his sentences was like a stone, fitly squared and perfectly laid. And so he built up before us, with crystal clearness, the beautiful fabric of our faith, lifting us, as it rose, to a region of the highest peace and contentment. Oh, the joy of it! My heart rests upon it still.
FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE
From a photograph lent by his daughter, Charlotte A. Hedge.
It is well known that Dr. Hedge received the most important part of his education in Germany. He was accordingly one of the first of those who helped to turn the fructifying current of German thought upon the somewhat arid soil of Puritan New England. This soil had indeed produced great things and great men, but the mind of New England was still too much dominated by the traditions of scholasticism, embodied in the system of Calvin. It needed an infusion of the æsthetic element, and the larger outlook of a truly speculative philosophy. The philosophy which it had inherited was one of dogmatism, sophistical in that it made its own syllogisms the final limit and bound of truth. The few Americans who had studied in real earnest in Germany brought back with them the wide sweeping besom of the Kantian method, and much besides. This showed the positive assumptions of the old school to have no such foundation of absolute truth as had been conceded to them. Under their guidance men had presumed to measure the infinite by their own petty standard, and to impose upon the Almighty the limits and necessities with which they had hedged the way of their fellow-men. God could not have mercy in any way other than that which they felt bound to prescribe. His wisdom must coincide with their conclusions. His charity must be as narrow as their own. Those who could not or would not acquiesce in these views were ruled outside of the domain of Christendom. Had it not been for Channing, Freeman, Buckminster, and a few others in that early day, they would have been as sheep without a shepherd. The history is well known. I need not repeat it here.
CHAPTER XIV
MEN AND MOVEMENTS IN THE SIXTIES
This decade, 1860-1870, marks a new epoch in my intellectual life. In the period already described, I had found my way to recognized authorship. In this later time, an even greater enlargement of activity was before me, unanticipated until, by gradual steps, I came into it.
The results of my more serious study now began to take form in writings of a corresponding scope. I remember to have heard John Weiss use more than once this phrase, "the poets and men of expression." The antithesis to this, in his view, evidently was, "the philosophers and men of deep thought."
I confess that I myself am one of those to whom expression, in some form, is natural and even necessary; and yet I think that my best studies have been those which have made me most desirous to give to my own voice the echo of other voices, and to ascertain by experiment how much or how little of my individual persuasion is in accordance with the normal direction of human experience.
In the days of which I now write, it was borne in upon me (as the Friends say) that I had much to say to my day and generation which could not and should not be communicated in rhyme, or even in rhythm.