MY DEAR BELLOWS,—Your letter came on New Year's Day, and helped to some of those cachinnations usually thought to belong to such a time; though for my part I can never find set times particularly happy or even interesting,—partly, I believe, from a certain obstinacy of disposition that does not like to do what is set down for it.
As to church matters, I said nothing to you when I was down last, because I knew nothing. That is, I had no hint of what the congregation was about to do,—no idea of anything in my connection with the church that needed to be spoken of. I was indeed thinking, for some weeks before I went down, of saying to the congregation, that unless they thought my services very important to them, I should rather they would dispense with them, and my mind was just in an even balance about the matter. But one is always influenced by the feeling around him,—at least I am,—and when I found that every one who spoke with me about my coming again seemed to depend upon it, and to be much [206] interested in it, I determined to say nothing about withdrawing. My reasons for wishing to retire were, that I was working hard—hard for me—to prepare sermons which, as my engagement in my view was temporary, might be of no further use to me; and that if I were to enter upon a new course of life, the sooner I did so the better.
And here I may as well dispose of what you and others say and urge with regard to my continuance in the profession. To your question whether I have not sermons enough to last me for five years in some new place, I answer, No, not enough for two. And if I had, I tell you that I cannot enter into these affecting and soul-exhausting relations again and again, any more than I could be married three or four times. The great trial of our calling is the wrenching, the agonizing, of sympathy with affliction; and there is another trying thing which I have thought of much of late, and that is the essential moral incongruity of such relations, and especially with strangers. I almost feel as if nobody but an intimate friend had any business in a house of deep affliction. In a congregation ever so familiar there is trial enough of this kind. If my friend is sick or dying, I go to his bedside of course, but it is as a friend,—to say a word or many words as the case may be; to look what I cannot say; to do what I can. But to come there, or to come to the desolate mourner, in an official capacity,—there is something in this which is in painful conflict with my ideas of the simple relations of man with man. Now all this difficulty is greatly increased when one enters upon a new ministration in a congregation of strangers. Therefore on every account I must say, no more pastoral relations for me. I cannot take [207] up into my heart another heap of human chance and change and sorrow. Do you not see it? Why, what takes place in New Bedford now moves me a hundred times more than all else that is in the world. And so it will always be with all that befalls my brethren in the Church of the Messiah.
As to the world's need of help, I regard it doubtless as you do; and I am willing and desirous to help it from the pulpit as far as I am able. But I cannot hold that sort of irregular connection with the pulpit called "supplying "; nor can I go out on distant missionary enterprises,—to Cincinnati, Mobile, or New Orleans. The first would yield me no support; and as to the last, I must live in my family. Besides, there is sphere enough with the pen; and study may do the world as much good as action. And there is no doubt what direction my studies must take. Why, I have written out within a week—written incontinently in my commonplace book, my pen would run on—a thesis on Pantheism nearly as long as a sermon. And as to preaching, what ground have I to think that mine is of any particular importance? Not that I mean to affect any humility which I do not feel. I profess that I have quite a good opinion of myself as a preacher. Seriously; I think I have one or two rather remarkable qualifications for preaching,—a sense of reality in the matter of the vitality of the thing, and then an edge of feeling (so it seems to me) which takes off the technical and commonplace character from discourse. Oh! if I could add, a full sense of the divineness of the thing, I should say all. Yet something of this, too, I hope; and I hope to grow in this as I hope to live, and do not dread to die. But though I think all this, with all due modesty, it does not [208] follow that others do; and the evidence seems to be rather against it, does it not?
As ever, yours,
ORVILLE DEWEY.
In connection with this letter, and with his own frank but moderate estimate of his gift as a preacher, it is interesting to read the following extract from a paper in his memory, read before the annual meeting of the American Unitarian Association by Rev. Dr. Briggs, May 30, 1882:
"I remember well the way in which he seemed to me to be a power in the pulpit. He was the first man who made the pulpit seem to me as a throne. When he stood in it, I recognized him as king. I remember how eager I was to walk in from the Theological School at Cambridge to hear him when there was an opportunity to do so in any of the pulpits of Boston. I remember walking with my classmate, Nathaniel Hall,—when the matter of the expense of a passage was of great concern to me,—to Providence, where Mr. Dewey was to preach at the installation of Dr. Hall. My Brother Hall was not drawn there simply for the sake of his brother's installation, I, not from the fact that Providence was the home of my boyhood; but both of us, more than by anything else, by our eager desire to hear this preacher where he might give us a manifestation of his power. And, as he spoke from the text, I have preached righteousness in the great congregation,' we felt that we were well repaid for all our efforts to come and listen to him.
"I have heard of some one who heard him preach from the text on dividing the sheep from the goats, and as he came away, he said, I felt as if I were standing before [209] the judgment-seat.' I remember hearing him preach from the text, Thou art the man,' and I felt that that word was addressed to me as directly as it was by the prophet to the king. His was a power scarcely known to the men of this later generation.
"It would be difficult, I think, to analyze his character and mind, and to say just in what his power consisted. He did not have the reasoning power that distinguished Dr. Walker; he did not have the poetic gift that gave such a charm to the sermons of Ephraim Peabody; he did not have that peculiarity of speech which made the sermons of Dr. Putnam so effective upon the congregation, and yet he was the peer of any one of them. It was, I think, because the truth had possession of his whole being when he spoke. It was because he always had a high ideal of the pulpit, and was striving to come up to it, and because he went to the pulpit with that preparation which alone makes any preaching effective, and which will make it mighty forever."