His path blocked by Providence, nothing remained but for him to develop those ideas where he was, and to lift his voice from those out-of-the-way hills against the sin of slavery. He would not use sugar in his coffee, “for,” said he, “every granule of it is tainted with the blood of the unhappy slave.” No article wrung out of involuntary servitude should come into his house. No product of slave labor would he touch. He was a prophet, for at this date people in New England had not ceased to buy and sell their fellow-creatures, and scores of years after this, ministers of the gospel in this country were diligently searching the Scriptures to discover and establish the divine foundations for human servitude.
Meanwhile the churches increase, the school-houses multiply, the industries prove their value, and the mountain people are led along, and led up from their abject poverty and misery to the experience of comfort and prosperity. Then he worked and waited for three-score years save one, and lived to see a rude and vulgar and despised people regenerated and transformed, saved from the dominion of vice to good morals and gentle manners, and many of them converted to a personal experience of the grace that is in Christ.
You may easily now examine the results of this life and service after the long years have tested them.
Should you go with me to his house you would cross the pont de la charité by the way of his well-constructed road. When Oberlin proposed to make this road, to blast the rocks along the mountain side, the people did not see how it would look as we now do. If he had suggested a step-ladder to the moon they would not have been more amazed. They applied to him all the deprecatory adjectives in their possession. It was impossible, and unreasonable, and visionary. Assuredly he had lost his mind. Much learning had made him mad. They positively refused to sustain him. He was altogether out of his sphere. This would have been a good time for him to have tendered his resignation, but the great soldier did not run away, because he was needed. They could not starve him out, for he knew how to starve.
But if the road were made it would be useless, they said, for “how could we get across the stream?” He replied: “We will take the rocks which we blast for the road and build a bridge.” This confirmed them that the pastor’s mind was clean gone forever. Such a departure from the old paths showed not only the danger of theological studies, but also a capacity for speculative views that would halt at nothing. Nevertheless, he led the way in this enterprise, and the people looked on amazed when they saw him picking and shoveling with his own hands. Then one came and followed him, and another came and followed him; then a score who soon were fifty, and next a hundred, until by the time they had reached the bridge they all believed in it and always had! The last man who was converted over to the majority undoubtedly went home and told his wife that the original idea of the improvement was his own; that he had it in mind long before Oberlin came, and he himself would have proposed it to their leader but for the conviction that ministers ought simply to preach the gospel and leave the labor question alone. Perhaps the trusting soul believed him.
As you enter the home where he was a father to this people who were as children to him and brethren to each other, you feel his protest against caste, and his teaching that if God is a universal father this destroys caste and makes brotherhood a reality. In his study in his own plain hand, you may find his missionary idea fully expanded, and from that study you will no longer look out upon the wilderness and the solitary place, because they have been made glad by him. You will find happy children in good schools and happy parents in good Christian homes.
Let me turn now from the influence of the life, to the life of the influence. It is not always easy to trace the pedigree of an idea or to track an influence. Sometimes we can in part, for they all have their parentage, and their evolution has been so direct that we can tell where and when they were born. Seven years after the sorrowing people had gathered about the missionary’s grave, two young men in this country—themselves having something of the prophetic instinct—in acquainting themselves with the work of this missionary prophet caught his spirit, and set themselves to incarnate his ideas and his methods, in consecrating themselves to the work of education in order to salvation. The influence which Oberlin never thought to send so far, had winged itself from his mountain tops across the wide sea to a little village in the new State of Ohio. Then these young men who found themselves in sympathy with his ideas of brotherhood, its obligations and its needs, with his feeling towards the slave and to all who might be uplifted, took upon themselves this moral and spiritual inheritance and began the foundations of a school which should bear the name of Oberlin and become the reproductive center of like ideas and influences. I do not say that there were no other influences, only that there was this one, dominant in spirit as well as in name. The young college took on this stamp, a missionary character, sympathy with people in low conditions, radical ideas of human brotherhood, profound convictions of duty towards the oppressed and ignorant. From the atmosphere of this influence, soon from the Professor’s chair in this College there came forth a strong man girded for a great sacrificial work.
A little Missionary Society, the embodiment of the idea which Oberlin three-score and ten years before had proclaimed upon the mountains, “No complicity with slavery,” consciously or unconsciously, having adopted the same faith and spirit, needed a leader. From the influences of Oberlin College came Rev. Dr. Whipple to sound the bugle blast which went echoing through the land: “We will not use the revenues of unrighteousness to do the work of righteousness.” Was it anything more than a coincidence or was it a providence, that with thirty years of singular sacrifice this strong man in obedience to his mind and heart was working out the same ideas which the great missionary prophet had so clearly held forth?
I am not now attempting to assert heredity of ideas, or to decide the precise degree of historic continuity that there may be in an influence. I have the easier task of following a distinct stream of influence, one among many which flow into the great river of life. With no purpose to measure it I see the providence. Another evolution from the same atmosphere of the same institution brings to the American Missionary Association kindred ideas, kindred faith and kindred spirit, in the second Corresponding Secretary, thus connecting the history, and expanding and deepening the influence.
Yesterday’s Annual Survey exhibited, as well as figures may, the work of the Society now after more than two-score years of history. It is interesting as a fact, independent of any weighing of influences, to note that in church work and in Sunday-school work, in educational instruction and industrial training, in teaching those who have not had the chances for life, how to think, how to work, how to aspire and how to rise, we find ourselves, as if working by a chart in the expansion of the missionary methods of this prophet who gave his life to rescuing the despised, teaching them how to live in the world that now is, while they are taught the lessons that shall fit them for the world to come. The education of the schools, the lessons in the establishment of good homes, the industries, the churches, are pressing on in the plain paths of providence until this day.