On April 26, 1891, the new Tabernacle was opened. There were three dedication services and thousands of people came. I was fifty-nine years of age. Up to this time everything had been extraordinary in its conflict, its warnings. I found myself, after over thirty years of service to the Gospel, pastor of the biggest Protestant church in the world. It seems to me there were more men of indomitable success during my career in America than at any other time. There were so many self-made men, so many who compelled the world to listen, and feel and do as they believed—men of remarkable energy, of prophetic genius.
Everywhere in England I had been asked about Cyrus W. Field. He was the hero of the nineteenth century. In his days of sickness and trouble the world remembered him. Of all the population of the earth he was the one man who believed that a wire could be strung across the Atlantic. It took him twelve years of incessant toil and fifty voyages across the Atlantic. I remember well, in 1857, when the cable broke, how everyone joined in the great chorus of "I told you so." There was a great jubilee in that choral society of wise know-nothings. Thirty times the grapnel searched the bottom of the sea and finally caught the broken cable, and the pluck and ingenuity of Cyrus W. Field was celebrated. Ocean cablegrams had ceased to be a curiosity, but some of us remember the day when they were. I kept a memorandum of the two first messages across the Atlantic that passed between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in the summer of 1858.
From England, in the Queen's name, came this:
"To the President of the United States, Washington—
"The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this great international work, in which the Queen has taken the deepest interest. The Queen is convinced that the President will join with her in fervently hoping that the electric cable which now connects Great Britain with the United States will prove an additional link between the nations whose friendship is founded upon their common interest and reciprocal esteem. The Queen has much pleasure in thus communicating with the President and renewing to him her wishes for the prosperity of the United States."
The President's answering cable was as follows:
"To Her Majesty Victoria, Queen of Great Britain—
"The President cordially reciprocates the congratulations of Her Majesty the Queen on the success of the great international enterprise accomplished by the science, skill, and indomitable energy of the two countries. It is a triumph more glorious than was ever won by any conquest on the field of battle. May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations and an instrument designed by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilisation, liberty and law throughout the world. In this view will not all nations of Christendom spontaneously unite in the declaration that it shall be forever neutral, and that its communications shall be held sacred in passing to their destination, even in the midst of hostilities.
"James Buchanan."
It is interesting to compare the elemental quality, the inner character of these national flashes of feeling, that came so comparatively soon after the days of the revolution in America. It was a sort of prose poetry of the new century. This recollection came back to me, on my return from Europe, upon the opening of the new Tabernacle, a symbol of the eternal human progress of the world. Materially and spiritually we were striving ahead, men of affairs, men of religion, philosophers, scientists, and poets.
I was present in 1891 at the celebration of Whittier's eighty-fourth birthday. He was on the bright side of eighty then. The schools celebrated the day, so should the churches have done, for he was a Christian poet.
John Greenleaf Whittier was a Quaker. That means that he was a genial, kind, good man—a simple man. I spent an afternoon with him once in a barn. We were summering in the mountains near by. We found ourselves in the barn, where we stretched out on the hay. The world had not spoiled the simplicity of his nature. It was an afternoon of pastoral peace, with one who had written himself into the heart of a nation. How much I learned from that man's childlikeness and simplicity!
If he had lived to be a hundred he would still have remained young. The long flight of years had not tired his spirit, for wherever the English language is spoken he will always live. He was born in Christmas week, a spirit in human shape, come to earth to keep it forever young. He was the bell-ringer of all youthful ages. And yet he remembered also those who for any reason could not join in the merriment of the holidays. To those I recommend Whittier's poem, in which he celebrates the rescue of two Quakers who had been fined £10 for attending church instead of going to a Quaker Meeting House, and not being able to pay the fine were first imprisoned and then sold as slaves, but no ship master consenting to carry them into slavery they were liberated. The closing stanza of this poem is worth remembering:—