A RETROSPECT OF LIFE.
His father dead, Henry W. Grady, a boy fourteen years of age, took up the battle of life. It would require a long chapter to record the names of orphans who have come to the top. When God takes away the head of the household He very often gives to some lad in that household a special qualification. Christ remembers how that His own father died early, leaving Him to support Himself and His mother and His brothers in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth, and He is in sympathy with all boys and all young men in the struggle. You say: “Oh, if my father had only lived I would have had a better education and I would have had a more promising start, and there are some wrinkles on my brow that would not have been there.” But I have noticed that God makes a special way for orphans. You would not have been half the man you are if you had not been obliged from your early days to fight your own battles. What other boys got out of Yale and Harvard you got in the university of hard knocks. Go among successful merchants, lawyers, physicians and men of all occupations and professions, and there are many of them who will tell you: “At ten, or twelve, or fifteen years of age, I started for myself; father was sick, or father was dead.” But somehow they got through and got up. I account for it by the fact that there is a special dispensation of God for orphans. All hail, the fatherless and motherless! The Lord Almighty will see you through. Early obstacles for Mr. Grady were only the means for development of his intellect and heart. And lo! when at thirty-nine years of age he put down his pen and closed his lips for the perpetual silence, he had done a work which many a man who lives on to sixty and seventy and eighty years never accomplishes. There is a great deal of senseless praise of longevity, as though it were a wonderful achievement to live a good while. Ah, my friends, it is not how long we live, but how well we live and how usefully we live. A man who lives to eighty years and accomplishes nothing for God or humanity might better have never lived at all. Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and what did it amount to? In all those more than nine centuries he did not accomplish anything which seemed worth record. Paul lived only a little more than sixty, but how many Methuselahs would it take to make one Paul? Who would not rather have Paul’s sixty years than Methuselah’s nine hundred and sixty-nine? Robert McCheyne died at thirty years of age and John Summerfield at twenty-seven years of age, but neither earth nor heaven will ever hear the end of their usefulness. Longevity! Why, an elephant can beat you at that, for it lives a hundred and fifty and two hundred years. Gray hairs are the blossoms of the tree of life if found in the way of righteousness, but the frosts of the second death if found in the way of sin.
MR. GRADY AS A CHRISTIAN.
One of our able New York journals last spring printed a question and sent it to many people, and, among others, to myself: “Can the editor of a secular journal be a Christian?” Some of the newspapers answered no. I answered yes; and, lest you may not understand me, I say yes again. Summer before last, riding with Mr. Grady from a religious meeting in Georgia on Sunday night, he said to me some things which I now reveal for the first time, because it is appropriate now that I reveal them. He expressed his complete faith in the gospel, and expressed his astonishment and his grief that in our day so many young men were rejecting Christianity. From the earnestness and the tenderness and the confidence with which he spoke on these things I concluded that when Henry W. Grady made public profession of his faith in Christ, and took his place at the holy communion in the Methodist Church, he was honestly and truly Christian. That conversation that Sunday night, first in the carriage and then resumed in the hotel, impressed me in such a way that when I simply heard of his departure, without any of the particulars, I concluded that he was ready to go. I warrant there was no fright in the last exigency, but that he found what is commonly called “the last enemy” a good friend, and from his home on earth he went to a home in heaven. Yes, Mr. Grady not only demonstrated that an editor may be a Christian, but that a very great intellect may be gospelized. His mental capacity was so wonderful it was almost startling. I have been with him in active conversation while at the same time he was dictating to a stenographer editorials for the Atlanta Constitution. But that intellect was not ashamed to bow to Christ. Among his last dying utterances was a request for the prayers of the churches in his behalf.
There was that particular quality in him that you do not find in more than one person out of hundreds of thousands—namely, personal magnetism. People have tried to define that quality, and always failed, yet we have all felt its power. There are some persons who have only to enter a room or step upon a platform or into a pulpit, and you are thrilled by their presence, and when they speak your nature responds and you cannot help it. What is the peculiar influence with which such a magnetic person takes hold of social groups and audiences? Without attempting to define this, which is indefinable, I will say it seems to correspond to the waves of air set in motion by the voice or the movements of the body. Just like that atmospheric vibration is the moral or spiritual vibration which rolls out from the soul of what we call a magnetic person. As there may be a cord or rope binding bodies together, there may be an invisible cord binding souls. A magnetic man throws it over others as a hunter throws a lasso. Mr. Grady was surcharged with this influence, and it was employed for patriotism and Christianity and elevated purposes.
GREAT MEN MAY BE CHRISTIANS.
You may not know why, in the conversation which I had with Mr. Gladstone a few weeks ago, he uttered these memorable words about Christianity, some of which were cabled to America. He was speaking in reply to this remark: I said: “Mr. Gladstone, we are told in America by some people that Christianity does very well for weak-minded men and children in the infant class, but it is not fit for stronger minded men; but when we mention you, of such large intellectuality, as being a pronounced friend of religion, we silence their batteries.” Then Mr. Gladstone stopped on the hillside where we were exercising, and said: “The older I grow, the more confirmed I am in my faith in religion.” “Sir,” said he, with flashing eye and uplifted hand, “talk about the questions of the day, there is but one question, and that is the Gospel. That can and will correct everything. Do you have any of that dreadful agnosticism in America?” Having told him we had, he went on to say: “I am profoundly thankful that none of my children or kindred have been blasted by it. I am glad to say that about all the men at the top in Great Britain are Christians. Why, sir,” he said, “I have been in public position fifty-eight years, and forty-seven years in the cabinet of the British government, and during those forty-seven years I have been associated with sixty of the master minds of the century, and all but five of the sixty were Christians.” He then named the four leading physicians and surgeons of his country, calling them by name and remarking upon the high qualities of each of them and added: “They are all thoroughly Christian.” My friends, I think it will be quite respectable for a little longer to be the friends of religion. William E. Gladstone, a Christian; Henry W. Grady, a Christian. What the greatest of Englishmen said of England is true of America and of all Christendom. The men at the top are the friends of God and believers in the sanctities of religion, the most eminent of the doctors, the most eminent of the lawyers, the most eminent of the merchants, and there are no better men in all our land than some of those who sit in editorial chairs. And if that does not correspond with your acquaintanceship, I am sorry that you have fallen into bad company. In answer to the question put last spring, “Can a secular journalist be a Christian?” I not only answer in the affirmative, but I assert that so great are the responsibilities of that profession, so infinite and eternal the consequences of their obedience or disobedience of the words of my text, “Take thee a great roll and write in it with a man’s pen,” and so many are the surrounding temptations, that the men of no other profession more deeply need the defenses and the reinforcements of the grace of God.
THE OPPORTUNITIES OF JOURNALISM.
And then look at the opportunities of journalism. I praise the pulpit and magnify my office, but I state a fact which you all know when I say that where the pulpit touches one person the press touches five hundred. The vast majority of people do not go to church, but all intelligent people read the newspapers. While, therefore, the responsibility of the minister is great, the responsibilities of editors and reporters is greater. Come, brother journalist, and get your ordination, not by the laying on of human hands, but by the laying on of the hands of the Almighty. To you is committed the precious reputation of men and the more precious reputation of women. Spread before our children an elevated literature. Make sin appear disgusting and virtue admirable. Believe good rather than evil. While you show up the hypocrisies of the church, show up the stupendous hypocrisies outside of the church. Be not, as some of you are, the mere echoes of public opinion; make public opinion. Let the great roll on which you write with a man’s pen be a message of light and liberty, and kindness and an awakening of moral power. But who is sufficient for these things! Not one of you without Divine help. But get that influence and the editors and reporters can go up and take this world for God and the truth. The mightiest opportunity in all the world for usefulness to-day is open before editors and reporters and publishers, whether of knowledge on foot, as in the book, or knowledge on the wing, as in the newspaper; I pray God, men of the newspaper press, whether you hear or read this sermon, that you may rise up to your full opportunity and that you may be divinely helped and rescued and blessed.
Some one might say to me: “How can you talk thus of the newspaper press when you yourself have sometimes been unfairly treated and misrepresented?” I answer that in the opportunity the newspaper press of this country and other countries have given me week by week to preach the gospel to the nations, I am put under so much obligation that I defy all editors and reporters, the world over, to write anything that shall call forth from me one word of bitter retort from now till the day of my death. My opinion is that all reformers and religious teachers, instead of spending so much time and energy in denouncing the press, had better spend more time in thanking them for what they have done for the world’s intelligence, and declaring their magnificent opportunity and urging their employment of it all for beneficent and righteous purposes.