Starr King in California

by William Day Simonds

"If we were to choose from the whole planet a score of men to represent us on some other globe or in some other system in a great human fair of the universe, it would not be kings, dukes, prime-ministers, the richest men, we should appoint as ambassadors to show what our race is, and what it is doing here, but the great thinkers, artists, and workers, the thinkers in ink, the thinkers in stone and color, the thinkers in force and homely matter, the men who are bringing the globe up towards the Creator's imagination and purpose; and on this mission the leaders of mechanic art would go side by side with Shakespeare and Milton, Angelo and Wren, Newton and Cuvier.

"In England, now, they are preparing statues of Brunel the engineer, and the Stephensons, father and son, to be finished and erected about the same time with those of Macaulay and Havelock. The nation is beginning to bow to the occupations and the genius that have added to her power ten thousand fold,—is beginning to bow to labor, noble, glorious, sacred labor."

Not alone in public pleas for unpopular causes but in private charity King seemed tireless. "He had the rare facility in everything he said and did of communicating himself; the most precious thing he could bestow." We are told that a multitude in distress came to this overburdened man. Ringing his doorbell they found entrance, and always as they came back, the "step was quicker which was slow before, the head was up which was down before, and the lips wreathed in smiles that were sad before."

Thus we can see that it was not solely his eloquent defense of liberty and justice which caused a San Francisco journal, reporting his funeral, to say, "Perhaps more deeply beloved by a vast number of our people than any other who has lived and toiled and died among us." His good deeds made him worthy of this, one of the most beautiful eulogies ever given mortal man, "No heart ever ached because of him until he died." This was Starr King the philanthropist, a friend to all who needed his friendship.

It would almost appear that in telling the story of "Starr King in California" we were altogether forgetting that he did not come to the State to influence its political action, or even to alleviate poverty and distress. He came as a preacher of Liberal Christianity, and to build up the church that had honored him with a call to its pulpit. Long before he left Boston it was written concerning him, "That he loved his calling, and that it was his ambition to pay the debt which every able man is said to owe to his profession, namely to contribute some work of permanent value to its literature." At that early period a discriminating critic bears testimony, "that his piety, pure, deep, tender, serene and warm, took hold of positive principles of light and beneficence, not the negative ones of darkness and depravity, and—himself a child of light—he preached the religion of spiritual joy."

It was King's first and chief ambition to be an effective preacher. In a letter, written in 1855, he says, "How we do need good preaching. Would that I could preach extempore." A wish that six years later "came true" in his San Francisco pulpit. In the inspiring atmosphere of his new field, and under the stress of a great era, King cast his manuscript aside, and though he made careful preparation, as every man must who speaks worthily, he never again submitted to the bondage of the "written sermon." To a man of King's gifts and temperament this was an immense gain. Indeed, Bostonian Californians were a unit in declaring that Easterners could have no conception of the man and orator Starr King became in those last great years of his brief life.

Speedily the little church in which he preached proved too small for the throng of eager listeners who gathered to hear him, and on the 3d day of December, 1862, the corner stone of a larger and more beautiful edifice was laid.

We shall find it no easy matter to analyze the sources of his power and popularity. Often-times success and failure are equal mysteries. Doubtless no small part of his triumph arose from the peculiar character of the new society to which he brought talents that commanded instant attention. The eager temper of the time fitted his sincere and earnest spirit. It was a perfect adjustment of the man and the hour, the workman and his task.

No small part of his popularity arose from the fact that he insisted upon his right and duty as a minister to discuss great questions of state in the pulpit. The vicious gulf churchmen discover between the sacred and the secular was hidden from his eyes. All that affected the humblest of his fellow men appealed to him as part and parcel of the 'gospel of righteousness he was commissioned to preach. In the old Boston days he had discussed freely in the pulpit such themes as the "Free Soil Movement," "The Fugitive Slave Law," and "The Dred Scott Decision." Burning questions these, and they were handled with no fear of man to daunt the severity of his condemnation when he declared that in the Dred Scott Decision the majority of the Supreme Court had betrayed justice for a political purpose. It was not likely that such a man would remain silent in the pulpit upon the so-called "war issues" of 1861. Early in that memorable year he boldly informed his people as to the course he intended to pursue so long as the war lasted. He would not equivocate and he would not be silent. Henceforth stirring patriotic sermons, as the demand for them arose, were the order of the day in the congregation to which he ministered. The character of these discourses may be partly determined from such titles as, "The Choice between Barabbas and Jesus," "The Treason of Judas Iscariot," "Secession in Palestine," and "Rebellion Pictures from Paradise Lost." "After the lapse of more than sixty years," so the Hon. Horace Davis assured the writer, "I can distinctly remember the fire and passion of those terrible indictments of treason and rebellion."

"Terrible indictments" truly, and in the storm and tempest of the time irresistibly attractive to men and women whose sympathies were on fire for the Northern cause. King's patriotism won for him a liberal hearing on subjects that otherwise the people would have declined to consider.