[Speech of Rev. John R. Paxton, D.D., at the seventy-seventh annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1882. Josiah M. Fiske, the President, occupied the chair. Dr. Paxton responded for "The Clergy.">[
Mr. President and Gentlemen:—There is no help for it, alas! now. The Pilgrim or Puritan doth bestride the broad continent like another Colossus and we Dutch, English, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, and Irish walk about under his huge legs [laughter]; "we must bend our bodies when he doth carelessly nod to us." For the Puritan is the pious Joseph of the land, and to his sheaf all our sheaves must make obeisance. As he pipes unto us so we dance. He takes the chief seat at every national feast and compels us highway-and-hedge people, us unfortunate Dutch and Scotch-Irish, to come in and shout his triumphs and praise at his own self-glorification meetings. [Laughter and applause.] Of course we all know it's a clear case of the tail wagging the dog. But it is too late now to go back to the order of nature or the truth of history. The Puritan, like another Old Man of the Sea, is astride our shoulders and won't come down, protest, pray, roll, wriggle as Sindbad may. Why, the Puritan has imposed his Thanksgiving Day and pumpkin-pie upon South Carolina, even. [Applause.] He got mad at the old Whig party, on account of his higher law and abolitionism, and put it to death. When the Puritan first came to these shores, he made the way to heaven so narrow that only a tight-rope performer could walk it. [Laughter.] Now, what with his Concord philosophies, transcendentalisms, and every heresy, he has made it so wide that you could drive all Barnum's elephants abreast upon it and through the strait gate. He compels us to send our sons to his colleges for his nasal note. He is communicating his dyspepsia to the whole country by means of codfish-balls and baked beans. He has encouraged the revolt of women, does our thinking, writes our books, insists on his standard of culture, defines our God, and, as the crowning glory of his audacity, has imposed his own sectional, fit, and distinguishing name upon us all, and swells with gratified pride to hear all the nations of the earth speak of all Americans as Yankees. [Laughter and applause.]
I would enter a protest, but what use? We simply grace his triumph, and no images may be hung at this feast but the trophies of the Puritan. For all that, I mean to say a brief word for my Scotch-Irish race in America. Mr. President, General Horace Porter, on my left, and I, did not come over in the Half Moon or the Mayflower. We stayed on in County Donegal, Ireland, in the loins of our forefathers, content with poteen and potatoes, stayed on until the Pilgrims had put down the Indians, the Baptists, and the witches; until the Dutch had got all the furs this side Lake Erie. [Laughter and applause.] By the way, what hands and feet those early Knickerbockers had! In trading with the Indians it was fixed that a Dutchman's hand weighed one pound and his foot two pounds in the scales. But what puzzled the Indian was that no matter how big his pack of furs, the Dutchman's foot was its exact weight at the opposite end of the scale. Enormous feet the first Van—or De—or Stuy—had. [Continued laughter.]
But in course of time, after the Pilgrims had come for freedom, the Dutch for furs, Penn for a frock—a Quaker cut and color—we came, we Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, for what? Perhaps the king oppressed the presbytery, or potatoes failed, or the tax on whiskey was doubled. Anyway we came to stay: some of us in New England, some in the valleys of Virginia, some in the mountains of North Carolina, others in New York; but the greater part pushed out into Pennsylvania—as far away as they could get from the Puritans and the Dutch—settled the great Cumberland Valley; then, crossing the Alleghany Mountains, staked out their farms on the banks of the Monongahela River, set up their stills, built their meeting-houses, organized the presbytery—and, gentlemen, the reputation of our Monongahela rye is unsurpassed to this day [long applause], and our unqualified orthodoxy even now turns the stomach of a modern Puritan and constrains Colonel Ingersoll[1] not to pray, alas! but to swear. [Loud laughter.]
Mr. President, I hope General Porter will join me in claiming some recognition for the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from these sons of the Puritans. For do you not know that your own man Bancroft says that the first public voice in America for dissolving all connection with Great Britain came not from the Puritans of New England, the Dutch of New York, nor the planters of Virginia, but from the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians? [Applause.] Therefore, Mr. President, be kind enough to accept from us the greeting of the Scotch-Irish of Pennsylvania, our native State—that prolific mother of pig-iron and coal, whose favorite and greatest sons are still Albert Gallatin, of Switzerland, and Benjamin Franklin, of Massachusetts. [Laughter and applause.]
The first son of a Forefather I ever fell in with was a nine-months Connecticut man at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in the spring of '62. Now, I was a guileless and generous lad of nineteen—all Pennsylvanians are guileless and generous, for our mountains are so rich in coal, our valleys so fat with soil, that our living is easy and therefore our wits are dull, and we are still voting for Jackson. [Great laughter.] The reason the Yankees are smart is because they have to wrest a precarious subsistence from a reluctant soil. "What shall I do to make my son get forward in the world?" asked an English lord of a bishop. "I know of only one way," replied the bishop; "give him poverty and parts." Well, that's the reason the sons of the Pilgrims have all got on in the world. They all started with poverty, and had to exercise their wits on nutmegs or notions or something to thrive. [Laughter.] Yes, they had "parts." Why, they have taken New York from the Dutch; they are half of Wall Street, and only a Jew, or a long-headed Sage, or that surprising and surpassing genius in finance, Jay,[2] can wrestle with them on equal terms. Ah! these Yankees have "parts"—lean bodies, sterile soil, but such brains that they grew a Webster. [Applause.] Well, this Connecticut man invited me to his quarters. When I got back to my regiment I had a shabby overcoat instead of my new one, I had a frying-pan worth twenty cents, that cost me five dollars, and a recipe for baked beans for which I had parted with my gold pen and pencil. [Continued laughter.] I was a sadder and a wiser man that night for that encounter with the Connecticut Pilgrim.
But my allotted time is running away, and, preacher-like, I couldn't begin without an introduction. I am afraid in this case the porch will be bigger than the house. But now to my toast, "The Clergy." Surely, Mr. President and gentlemen, you sons of the Pilgrims appreciate the debt you owe the Puritan divines. What made your section great, dominant, glorious in the history of our common country? To what class of your citizens—more than to any other, I think—do you owe the proud memories of your past, and your strength, achievements, and culture in the present? Who had the first chance on your destiny, your character, your development? Why, the Puritan preacher, of course; the man who in every parish inculcated the fear of God in your fathers' souls, obedience to law, civil and divine, the dignity of man, the worth of the soul and right conduct in life. [Applause.] Believe me, gentlemen, the Puritan clergy did a great work for New England. Our whole country feels yet the impulse and movement given it by those stern preachers of righteousness, who had Abrahamic eyes under their foreheads and the stuff of Elijah in their souls. [Applause.] I know it's the fashion now to poke fun at the Puritans, to use the "Blue Laws" as a weapon against them, to sneer at them as hard, narrow, and intolerant. Yes, alas! we do not breathe through their lungs any more. The wheel has gone round, and we have come back to the very things the Puritans fled from in hatred and in horror.
We pride ourselves these days on our "sweetness and light," on our culture and manners. The soul of the age is hospitable and entertains, like an inn, "God or the devil on equal terms," as George Eliot says. Alas! the Puritan chart has failed us in the sea through which we are passing; the old stars have ceased to shine; too many of us know neither our course nor destination; "authority is mute;" the "Thus saith the Lord" of the Puritan is not enough now for our guidance. For the age is in all things not one of reason or of faith, but of speculation not only in the business of the world, but in all moral and spiritual questions as well. Well, we shall see what we shall see. But for one, I admire with all my soul a man who knows just what he was put into this world for, what his chief end in it is, what he believes, must do and must be, and in the ways thereof is willing to inflict or to suffer death. [Applause.] The Puritan divine was such a man. He sowed your rocky coasts and sterile hills with conscience and God. You are living on the virtue that came out of the hem of his garment; he is our bulwark still in this land against superstition on the one hand and infidelity on the other. [Applause.] Grand man he was, the old Puritan; once arrived he was always arrived; while other men hesitated he acted; while others debated he declared; fearing God, he was lifted above every other fear; and though he has passed away for a time—only for a time, remember: the wheel is still turning, we can't stand on air—he will come back again, but in the meantime he is still a "preacher of righteousness" to our souls as effective in death as in life. [Applause.]
In your presence I greet with my warmest admiration, I salute with my profound reverence, the old Puritan divines of New England who had a scorn for all base uses of life, who were true to duty as they saw it, who had convictions for which they would kill or die, who formed their characters and guided their lives by the law of righteousness in human conduct. To these men under God we largely owe our liberties and our laws in this land. I take off my hat to his ghost, and salute him as greater than he who has taken a city, for the Puritan divine conquered himself. He was an Isaac, not an Ishmael; he was a Jacob, not an Esau; a God-born man who knew what his soul did wear. Great man he was, hard, stern, and intolerant. Yes, but what would you have, gentlemen? The Puritan was not a pretty head carved on a cherry-stone, but a Colossus cut from the rock, huge, grim, but awe-inspiring, fortifying to the soul if not warming to the heart. [Applause.]
Well, would he know you to-night, I wonder, his own sons, if he came in upon you now, in circumstances so different and with manners and customs so changed? Would he gaze at you with sad, sad eyes, and weep over you as the degenerate sons of noble sires? [Laughter.] No, no; you are worthy, I think. The sons will keep what the fathers won. After all, you are still one with the Puritan in all essential things. [Applause.] You clasp hands with him in devotion to the same principle, in obedience to the same God. True, the man between doublet and skin plays many parts; fashions come and go, never long the same, but "clothe me as you will I am Sancho Panza still." So you are Puritans still. Back of your Unitarianism, back of your Episcopalianism, back of your Transcendentalism, back of all your isms, conceits, vagaries—and there is no end to them—back of them all there beats in you the Puritan heart. Blood will tell. Scratch a child of sweetness and light on Beacon Hill to-day and you will find a Puritan. [Laughter.] Scratch your Emerson, your Bellows, your Lowell, your Longfellow, your Wendell Phillips, your Phillips Brooks, and you find the Puritan. [Applause.] In intellectual conclusions vastly different, in heart, at bottom, you're all one in love of liberty, in fear of God, contempt for shams, and scorn of all things base and mean. [Applause.]