“The simple truth is,” and I quote his words exactly, “that any child of God, who in any adequate way believes that he can partake of the divine nature, knows that he has strength enough for any business which looks the right way; that is, which helps to bring God’s kingdom into the world. Well, if you are working with Aladdin’s lamp, or with Monte Cristo’s treasures, you are not apt to think you will fail. Far less will you think you will fail if you are working with the omnipotence of the Lord God behind you. When people talk to me, therefore, about optimism or good spirits or expecting success, if I know them well enough I say that I am promised infinite power to work with, and that whenever I have trusted it fairly and squarely, I have found that the promise was true.”
He stopped, and under the shelter of a high steeple we separated: and the parish priest, the author, the eager citizen, the helper of poor girls and struggling young men, the man of power, the Christian cosmopolitan, strode down the street, and was lost in the mist.
I could not help calling to mind a pretty story told of him while he was travelling in the West. As the train stopped at some forsaken hamlet in California, twenty girls were seen upon the platform. On hearing that Edward E. Hale was to pass through, they had begged off from school in order to greet him. They were “King’s Daughters,” and Doctor Hale was their inspiration and their chief. Each girl was loaded with a different flower, with which she garlanded her hero.
Such a tender and reverential free-masonry as this, founded by himself, greets him daily through the mail, and overwhelms him when he travels from his own home.
As the author of “The Man Without a Country,” “In His Name,” and “Ten Times One is Ten,” he sways our imagination and our hearts. But let him also be known as a man content to be a parish minister, and as one who never fails to lend a hand when the chance is given to him.
E. E. HALE IN 1847. FROM A PAINTING BY RICHARD HINSDALE.