Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. / Edited by His Daughter

by Orville Dewey

"Dewey is undoubtedly the founder and most conspicuous example of what is best in the modern school of preaching. The characteristic feature is the effort to carry the inspiration, the correction, and the riches of Christian faith into the whole sphere of human life; to make religion practical, without lowering its ideal; to proclaim our present world and our mortal life as the field of its influence and realization, trusting that what best fits men to live and employ and enjoy their spiritual nature here, is what best prepares them for the future life. Dewey, like Franklin, who trained the lightning of the sky to respect the safety, and finally to run the errands of men on earth, brought religion from its remote home and domesticated it in the immediate present. He first successfully taught its application to the business of the market and the street, to the offices of home and the pleasures of society. We are so familiar with this method, now prevalent in the best pulpits of all Christian bodies, that we forget the originality and boldness of the hand that first turned the current of religion into the ordinary channel of life, and upon the working wheels of daily business. The glory of the achievement is lost in the magnificence of its success. Practical preaching, when it means, as it often does, a mere prosaic recommendation of ordinary duties, a sort of Poor Richard's prudential [361] maxims, is a shallow and nearly useless thing. It is a kind of social and moral agriculture with the plough and the spade, but with little regard to the enrichment of the soil, or drainage from the depths or irrigation from the heights. The true, practical preaching is that which brings the celestial truths of our nature and our destiny, the powers of the world to come and the terrors and promises of our relationship to the Divine Being, to bear upon our present duties, to animate and elevate our daily life, to sanctify the secular, to redeem the common from its loss of wonder and praise, to make the familiar give up its superficial tameness, to awaken the sense of awe in those who have lost or never acquired the proper feeling of the spiritual mystery that envelops our ordinary life. This was Dewey's peculiar skill. Poets had already done it for poets, and in a sense neither strictly religious nor expected to be made practical. But for preachers to carry `the vision and faculty divine' of the poet into the pulpit, and with the authority of messengers of God, demand of men in their business and domestic service, their mechanical labors, their necessary tasks, to see God's spirit and feel God's laws everywhere touching, inspiring, and elevating their ordinary life and lot, was something new and glorious. Thus Dewey revitalized the doctrine of Retribution by bringing it from the realms a futurity down to the immediate bosoms of men; and nothing more solemn, affecting, and true is to be found in all literature than his famous two sermons on Retribution, in the first volume of his published works. Spirituality, in the same manner, he called away from its ghostly churchyard haunts, and made it a cheerful angel of God's presence in the house and the shop, where the sense and feeling of God's holiness [362] and love make every duty an act of worship, and every commonest experience an opportunity of divine service. Under the thoughtful, tender yet searching, rational but profoundly spiritual preaching of Dr. Dewey,—where men's souls found an holiest and powerful interpreter, and nature, business, pleasure, domestic ties, received a fresh consecration,-who can wonder that thousands of men and women, hitherto dissatisfied, hungry, but with no appetite for the bread' called of life,' furnished at the ordinary churches, were, for the first time, made to realize the beauty of holiness and the power of the gospel of salvation?

"The persuasiveness of Dewey was another of his greatest characteristics. His yearning to convince, his longing to impart his own convictions, gave a candor and patient and sweet reasonableness to his preaching, which has, I think, never been equalled in any preacher of his measure of intellect, height of imagination, and reverence of soul. For he could never lower his ideals to please or propitiate. He was working for no immediate and transitory effects. He could use no arts that entangled, dazzled, or frightened; nothing but truth, and truth cautiously discriminated. His sermons were born of the most painful labors of his spirit; they were careful and finished works, written and rewritten, revised, corrected, improved, almost as if they had been poems addressed to the deliberate judgment of posterity. They possess that claim upon coming generations, and will, one day, rediscovered by a deeper and better spiritual taste, take their place among the noblest and most exquisite of the intellectual and spiritual products of this century. There are thousands of the best minds in this country that owe whatever interest they have in religion [363] to Orville Dewey. The majesty of his manner, the dramatic power of his action, the poetic beauty of his illustrations, the logical clearness and fairness of his reasoning, the depth and grasp of his hold on all the facts, human and divine, material and spiritual, that belonged to the theme he treated, gave him a surpassing power and splendor, and an equal persuasiveness as a preacher. But what is most rare, his sermons, though they gained much by delivery, lose little in reading, for those who never heard them. They are admirably adapted to the pulpit, none more so; but just as wonderfully suited to the library and to solitary perusal. I am not extravagant or alone in this opinion. I know that so competent a critic as James Martineau holds them in equal admiration.

"I shall make no excuse for dwelling so long upon Orville Dewey's genius as a preacher. No plainer duty exists than to commend his example to the study and imitation of our own preachers; and no exaltation that the Church of the Messiah will ever attain can in any probability equal that which will always be given to it as the seat of Dr. Dewey's thirteen years' ministry in the city of New York. Of the tenderness, modesty, truthfulness, devotion, and spotless purity of his life and character, it is too soon to utter all that my heart and knowledge prompt me to say. But, when expression shall finally be allowed to the testimony which cannot very long be denied free utterance, it will fully appear that only a man whose soul was haunted by God's spirit from early youth to extreme old age could have produced the works that stand in his name. The man is greater than his works."

[364]In the August following my father's death, an appropriate service was held in his memory at the old Congregational Church in his native village. It was the church of his childhood, from whose galleries he had looked down with childish pity upon the sad-browed communicants; [see p. 16] it was the church to which he had joined himself in the religious fervor of his youth; from it he had been thrust out as a heretic, and for years was not permitted to speak within its walls, the first time being in 1876, when the town celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the Resolution that had marked its Revolutionary ardor, and called upon him, as one of its most distinguished citizens, to preach upon the occasion; and now the old church opened wide its doors in affectionate respect to his memory, and his mourning townspeople met to honor the man they had learned to love, if not to follow.

It was a lovely summer day, full of calm and sunny sweetness. The earlier harvests had been gathered in, and the beautiful valley lay in perfect rest,-"Like a full heart, having prayed."

Taghkonic brooded above it in gentle majesty, and the scarce seen river wound its quiet course among the meadows. No touch of drought or decay had yet passed upon the luxuriant foliage; but the autumnal flowers were already glowing [365] in the fields and on the waysides, and, mingled with ferns and ripened grain, were heaped in rich profusion by the loving hands of young girls to adorn the church. It was Sunday, and people and friends came from far and near, till the building was filled; and in the pervading atmosphere of tender respect and sympathy, the warm-hearted words spoken from the pulpit seemed like the utterance of the common feeling. The choir sang, with much expression, one of my father's favorite hymns,-"When, as returns this solemn day;" and the prayer, from Dr. Eddy, the pastor of the church, was a true uplifting of hearts to the Father of all. The fervent and touching discourse which followed, by Rev. Robert Collyer, minister of my father's old parish, the Church of the Messiah, in New York, recalled the early days of Dr. Dewey's life, and the influences from home and from nature that had borne upon his character, and described the man and his work in terms of warm and not indiscriminate eulogy. The speaker's brow lightened, and his cheek glowed with the strength of his own feeling, and among his listeners there was an answering thrill of gratitude and of aspiration.

Dr. Powers, an Episcopal clergyman, then read a short and graceful original poem, and some cordial and earnest words were said by the two Orthodox ministers present. Another hymn was sung by the whole congregation; and thus fitly closed the simple and reverent service, typical throughout of the kindly human brotherhood which, notwithstanding inevitable differences of opinion, binds together hearts that throb with one common need, that rest upon one Eternal Love and Wisdom.

So would my father have wished it. So may it be more and more!