T. De Witt Talmage Part 6
Up to this time I had echoed Horace Greeley's advice, "Go West." For years afterwards I changed it. In my advice to young men I said to all, "Go South."
In the spring of 1878, however, things in Brooklyn began to look more promising for young men and young women. I remember after closely examining Mayor Howell's report and the Police Commissioner's report I was much pleased. Mayor Howell was one of the most courteous and genial men I ever knew, and Superintendent Campbell was a good police officer.
These two men, by their individual interest in Brooklyn reforms, had gained the confidence of our tax-payers and our philanthropists. The police force was too small for a city of 5,000,000 people. The taxes were not big enough to afford an adequate equipment. There was a constant depreciation of our police and excise officials in the churches. City officials should not be caricatured--they should be respected, or dismissed. It was about this time a mounted police department was started in Brooklyn, and though small it was needed. What the miscreant community of Brooklyn most needed at this time was not sermons or lessons in the common schools, but a police club--and they got it.
There was a political avarice in Brooklyn in the management of our public taxes which handicapped the local government. For a long while I had been thinking about some way of presenting this sin to my people, when one day a woman, Barbara Allen by name, dropping in fatal illness, was picked up at the Fulton Ferry House, and died in the ambulance. On her arm was a basket of cold victuals she had lugged from house to house. In the rags of her clothing were found deposit slips in the savings banks of Brooklyn--for $20,000. The case was unique at that time, because in those days great wealth was unknown, even in New York, and the houses in Brooklyn were homes--not museums. Twenty thousand dollars was a fortune. It was a precedent that established miserliness as an actual sin, a dissipation just as deadly as that of the spendthrift. It was a tragic scene from the drama of life, and its surprise was avarice. The whole country read about Barbara Allen, and wondered what new strange disease this was that could scourge a human soul with a madness for acc.u.mulating money without spending it. The people of the United States suffered from quite a different idea of money. They were just beginning to feel the great American fever for spending more of it than they could get. This was a serious phase of social conditions then, and I remember how keenly I felt the menace of it at the time. Those who couldn't get enough to spend became envious, jealous, hateful of those who could and these envious ones were the American ma.s.ses.
In the spring of 1878, in May, there was a tiger sprang out of this jungle of discontent, and, crouching, threatened to spring upon American Society.
It was--Communism. Its theory was that what could not be obtained lawfully, under the pressure of circ.u.mstances, you could take anyhow.
Communism meant no individual rights in property. If wages were not adequate to the luxurious appet.i.te, then the wage-earner claimed the right to knock his employer down and take what he wanted. "Bread or blood" was the motto. It all came from across the Atlantic, and it spread rapidly. In Brooklyn, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, it was evident that Communism was organising, that its executive desperadoes met in rooms, formed lodges, invented grips and pa.s.s-words.
In the eighth ward of New York an organisation was unearthed at this time, consisting of 800 men, all armed with muskets and revolvers. These organisations described themselves as working-men's parties, and so tried to ally themselves with the interests of trade unions.
Twenty American newspapers advocated this shocking creed. Tens of thousands adopted this theory. I said then, in response to the opinion that Communism was impossible in this country, that there were just as many cut-throats along the East River and the Hudson as there were along the Seine or the Thames. There was only one thing that prevented revolution in our cities in this memorable spring of 1878, and that was the police and the military guard.
Through dissatisfaction about wages, or from any cause, men have a right to stop work, and to stop in bands and bodies until their labour shall be appreciated; but when by violence, as in the summer of 1877, they compel others to stop, or hinder subst.i.tutes from taking the places, then the act is Communistic, and ought to be riven of the lightnings of public condemnation. What was the matter in Pittsburg that summer? What fired the long line of cars that made night hideous? What lifted the wild howl in Chicago? Why, coming toward that city, were we obliged to dismount from the cars and take carriages through the back streets? Why, when one night the Michigan Central train left Chicago, were there but three pa.s.sengers on board a train of eight cars? What forced three rail trains from the tracks and shot down engineers with their hands on the valves? Communism. For hundreds of miles along the track leading from the great West I saw stretched out and coiled up the great reptile which, after crushing the free locomotive of pa.s.sengers and trade, would have twisted itself around our republican inst.i.tutions, and left them in strangulation and blood along the pathway of nations. The governors of States and the President of the United States did well in planting the loaded cannon at the head of streets blocked up by desperadoes. I felt the inspiration of giving warning, and I did.
But the summer came, August came, and after a lecture tour through the far West I was amazed and delighted to find there a tremendous harvest in the grain fields. I had seen immense crops there about to start on their way to the Eastern sea-boundary of our continent. I saw then that our prosperity as a nation would depend upon our agriculture. It didn't make any difference what the Greenback party, or the Republican and Democratic parties, or the Communists were croaking about; the immense harvests of the West indicated that nothing was the matter. What we needed in the fall of 1878 was some cheerful talk.
During this summer two of the world's celebrities died: Charles Mathews, the famous comedian, and the great American poet, William Cullen Bryant.
Charles Mathews was an ill.u.s.trious actor. He was born to make the world laugh, but he had a sad life of struggle.
While Charles Mathews was performing in London before immense audiences, one day a worn-out and gloomy man came into a doctor's shop, saying, "Doctor, what can you do for me?" The doctor examined his case and said, "My advice is that you go and see Charles Mathews." "Alas! Alas!" said the man, "I myself am Charles Mathews."
In the loss of William Cullen Bryant I felt it as a personal bereavement of a close friend. Nowhere have I seen the following incident of his life recorded, an incident which I still remember as one of the great events in my life.
In the days of my boyhood I attended a meeting at Tripler Hall, held as a memorial of Fenimore Cooper, who at that time had just died.
Washington Irving stepped out on the speaker's platform first, trembling, and in evident misery. After stammering and blushing and bowing, he completely broke down in his effort to make a speech, and briefly introduced the presiding officer of the meeting, Daniel Webster. Rising like a huge mountain from a plain this great orator introduced another orator--the orator of the day--William Cullen Bryant.
In that memorable oration, lasting an hour and a half, the speaker told lovingly the story of the life and death of the author of "Leather Stocking" and "The Last of the Mohicans."
George W. Bethune followed him, thundering out in that marvellous flow of ideas, with an eloquence that made him the pulpit orator of his generation in the South. Bryant's hair was then just touched with grey.
The last time I saw him was in my house on Oxford Street, two years ago, in a company of literary people. I said: "Mr. Bryant, will you read for us 'Thanatopsis'?" He blushed like a girl, and put his hands over his face and said: "I would rather read anything than my own production; but if it will give you pleasure I will do anything you say." Then at 82 years of age, and without spectacles, he stood up and with most pathetic tenderness read the famous poem of his boyhood days, and from a score of lips burst forth the exclamation, "What a wonderful old man!" What made all the land and all the world feel so badly when William Cullen Bryant was laid down at Roslyn? Because he was a great poet who had died? No; there have been greater poets. Because he was so able an editor? No; there have been abler editors. Because he was so very old? No; some have attained more years. It was because a spotless and n.o.ble character irradiated all he wrote and said and did.
These great men of America, how much they were to me, in their example of doing and living!
Probably there are many still living who remember what a disorderly place Brooklyn once was. Gangs of loafers hung around our street corners, insulting and threatening men and women. Carriages were held up in the streets, the occupants robbed, and the vehicles stolen.
Kidnapping was known. Behind all this outrage of civil rights was political outrage. The politicians were afraid to offend the criminals, because they might need their votes in future elections. They were immune, because they were useful material in case of a new governor or President. It was a reign of terror that spread also in other large cities. The farmers of Ohio and Pennsylvania were threatened if they did not stop buying labour-saving machinery. They were not the threats of the working-man, but of the lazy, criminal loafers of the country. It is worth mentioning, because it was a convulsion of an American period, a national growing pain, which I then saw and talked about. The nation was under the cloud of political ambition and office-seeking that unsettled business conditions. Every one was occupied in President-making, although we were two years from the Presidential election. There was plenty of money, but people held on to it.
The yellow fever scourge came down upon the South during the late summer of 1878, and softened the hearts of some. There was some money contributed from the North, but not as much as there ought to have been.
In the Brooklyn Tabernacle we did the best we could; New York city had been ravaged by yellow fever in 1832, the year I was born, but the memory of that horror was not keen enough to influence the collection plate. What with this suffering of our neighbours in the South, and the troubles of political jealousies local and national, there were cares enough for our church to consider. Still, the summer of 1878 was almost through, and many predictions of disaster had failed. We had been threatened with general riots. It was predicted that on June 27 all the cars and railroad stations would be burned, because of a general strike order. We were threatened with a fruit famine. It was said that the Maryland and New Jersey peach crop was a failure. I never saw or ate so many peaches any summer before.
Then there was the Patten investigation committee, determined to send Mr. Tilden down to Washington to drive the President out of the White House. None of these things happened, yet it is interesting to recall this phase of American nerves in 1878.
There was one event that aroused my disgust, however, much more than the croakers had done--Ben Butler was nominated for Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts. That was when politics touched bottom. There was no lower depths of infamy for them to reach. Ben Butler was the chief demagogue of the land. The Republican party was to be congratulated that it got rid of him. His election was a cross put upon the State of Ma.s.sachusetts for something it had done we knew not of. Fortunately there were men like Roscoe Conkling in politics to counterbalance other kinds.
Backed up by unscrupulous politicians, the equally irresponsible railroad promoter began his invasion of city streets with his noisy scheme. I opposed him, but the problem of transportation then was not as it is now. Just as the year 1879 had begun, a gigantic political promoting scheme for an elevated railroad in Brooklyn was attempted.
From Boston came the promoters with a proposition to build the road, without paying a cent of indemnity to property holders. I suggested that an appeal be made to Brooklynites to subscribe to a company for the agricultural improvements of Boston Common. It was a parallel absurdity.
Mayor Howell, of Brooklyn, courageously opposed an elevated road franchise, unless property holders were paid according to the damage to the property. This was one of many inspired grafts of political Brooklyn, years ago.
A great event in the world was the announcement in November, 1878, that Professor Thomas Edison had applied for a patent for the discovery of the incandescent electric light. He harnessed the flame of a thunderbolt to fit in a candlestick. I hope he made millions of dollars out of it.
In direct contradiction to this progress in daily life there came, at the same time, from the Philadelphia clergy a protest against printing their sermons in the secular press. It was an injustice to them, they declared, because the sermons were not always fully reported. I did not share these opinions. If a minister's gospel is not fit for fifty thousand people, then it is not fit for the few hundred members of his congregation. My own sermons were being published in the secular press then, as they had been when I was in Philadelphia.
Almost at the close of the year 1878 the loss of the S.S. "Pomerania,"
in collision in the English Channel, was a disaster of the sea that I denounced as nothing short of murder. It was shown at the trial that there was no fog at the time, that the two vessels saw each other for ten minutes before the collision. If such gross negligence as this was possible, I advised those people who bought a ticket for Europe on the White Star, the Cunard, the Hamburg, or other steamship lines, to secure at the same time a ticket for Heaven. What a difference in the ocean ferry-boat of to-day!
Scarcely had the submarine telegraph closed this chapter of sea horror than it clicked the information that the beautiful Princess Alice had died in Germany. Only a few days later, in America, we were in mood of mourning for Bayard Taylor, our Minister Plenipotentiary to Germany. In the death of Princess Alice we felt chiefly a sympathy for Queen Victoria, who had not then, and never did, overcome her grief at the loss of Prince Albert. In the decease of Bayard Taylor we remembered with pride that he was a self-made gentleman of a school for which there is no known system of education. Regarded as a dreamy, unpractical boy, nothing much was ever expected of him. When he was seventeen he set type in a printing office in Westchester. It was Bayard Taylor who exploded the idea that only the rich could afford to go to Europe, when on less than a thousand dollars he spent two years amid the palaces and temples, telling of his adventures in a way that contributed cla.s.sic literature to our book-shelves. He worked hard--wrote thirty-five books. There is genius in hard work alone. I have often thought that women pursue more of it than men. They work night and day, year in and year out, from kitchen to parlour, from parlour to kitchen.
There was some strong legislative effort made in our country about this time to exclude the Chinese. I opposed this legislation with all the voice and ability I had, because I felt not merely the injustice of such contradiction of all our national inst.i.tutions, but I saw its political folly. I saw that the nation that would be the most friendly to China, and could get on the inside track of her commerce, would be the first nation of the world. The legislature seemed particularly angry with the Chinese immigrants in this country because they would not allow themselves to be buried here. They were angry with the Chinese then because they would not intermarry. They were angry with the Chinese because they invested their money in China. They did not think they were handsome enough for this country. We even wanted a monopoly of good looks in those days.
I was particularly friendly to the Chinese. My brother, John Van Nest Talmage, devoted his life to them. I believed, as my brother did, that they were a great nation.
When he went, my last brother went. Stunned was I until I staggered through the corridors of the hotel in London, England, when the news came that John was dead. If I should say all that I felt I would declare that since Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles a more faithful or consecrated man has not lifted his voice in the dark places of heathenism. I said it while he was alive, and might as well say it now that he is dead. He was the hero of our family. He did not go to China to spend his days because no one in America wanted to hear him preach.
At the time of his first going to China he had a call to succeed in Brooklyn, N.Y., the Rev. Dr. Broadhead, the Chrysostom of the American pulpit, a call at a large salary; and there would have been nothing impossible to my brother in the way of religious work or Christian achievement had he tarried in his native land. But nothing could detain him from the work to which G.o.d called him long before he became a Christian.
My reason for writing that anomalous statement is that, when a small boy in Sabbath-school, he read a library book, "The Life of Henry Martin."
He said to my mother, "I am going to be a missionary." The remark at the time made no special impression. Years after that pa.s.sed on before his conversion; but when the grace of G.o.d appeared to him, and he had entered his studies for the Gospel ministry, he said one day, "Mother, do you remember that years ago I said, 'I am going to be a missionary'?"
She replied, "Yes, I remember it." "Well," said he, "I am going to keep my promise." How well he kept it millions of souls on earth and in Heaven have long since heard. When the roll of martyrs is called before the throne, the name of John Van Nest Talmage will be called. He worked himself to death in the cause of the world's evangelisation. His heart, his brain, his hand, his voice, his muscles, his nerves could do no more. He sleeps in the cemetery of Somerville, N.J., so near his father and mother that he will face them when he arises in the resurrection of the just, and, amid a crowd of his kindred now sleeping on the right of them and on the left of them, will feel the thrill of the trumpet that wakes the dead.
You could get nothing from my brother at all. Ask him a question to evoke what he had done for G.o.d and the Church, and his lips were as tightly shut as though they had never been opened. Indeed, his reticence was at times something remarkable. I took him to see President Grant at Long Branch, and though they had both been great warriors, the one fighting the battles of the Lord and the other the battles of his country, they had little to say, and there was, I thought, at the time, more silence crowded together than I ever noticed in the same amount of s.p.a.ce before.
But the story of my brother's work has already been told in the Heavens by those who, through his instrumentality, have already reached the City of Raptures. However, his chief work is yet to come. We get our chronology so twisted that we come to believe that the white marble of the tomb is the milestone at which the good man stops, when it is only a milestone on a journey, the most of the miles of which are yet to be travelled. The Chinese Dictionary which my brother prepared during more than two decades of study; the religious literature he transferred from English into Chinese; the hymns he wrote for others to sing, although he himself could not sing at all (he and I monopolising the musical incapacity of a family in which all the rest could sing well); the missionary stations he planted; the life he lived, will widen out and deepen and intensify through all time and all eternity.
Never in the character of a Chinaman was there the trait of commercial fraud that a.s.sailed our American cities in 1879. It got into our food finally--the very bread we ate was proven to be an adulteration of impure stuff. What an extravagance of imagination had crept into our daily life! We pretended even to eat what we knew we were not eating.
Except for the reminder which old books written in byegone simpler days gave us, we should have insisted that the world should believe us if we said black was white. Still, among us there were some who were genuine, but they seemed to be pa.s.sing away. It was in this year that the oldest author in America died, Richard Henry Dana. He was born in 1788, when literature in this country was just beginning. His death stirred the tenderest emotions. Authorship was a new thing in America when Mr. Dana began to write, and it required endurance and persistence. The atmosphere was chilling to literature then, there was little applause for poetic or literary skill. There were no encouragements when Washington Irving wrote as "Knickerbocker," when Richard Henry Dana wrote "The Buccaneer," "The Idle Man," and "The Dying Raven." There was something cracking in his wit, exalted in his culture. He was so gentle in his conversation, so pure in his life, it was hard to spare him. He seemed like a man who had never been forced into the battle of the world, he was so unscarred and hallowed.
It was just about this time that our Tabernacle in Brooklyn became the storm centre of a law-suit which threatened to undermine us. It was based upon a theory, a technicality of law, which declared that the subscriptions of married women were not legal subscriptions. Our attorneys were Mr. Freeman and Judge Tenney. Theirs was a battle for G.o.d and the Church. There were only two sides to the case. Those against the Church and those with the Church. In the preceding eight years, whether against fire or against foe, the Tabernacle had risen to a higher plane of useful Christian work. I was not alarmed. During the two weeks of persecution, the days were to me days of the most complete peace I had felt since I entered the Christian life. Again and again I remember remarking in my home, to my family, what a supernatural peace was upon me. My faith was in G.o.d, who managed my life and the affairs of the Church. My work was still before me, there was too much to be done in the Tabernacle yet. The disapproval of our methods before the Brooklyn Presbytery was formulated in a series of charges against the pastor. I was told my enthusiasm was sinful, that it was unorthodox for me to be so. My utterances were described as inaccurate. My editorial work was offensively criticised. The Presbytery listened patiently, and after a careful consideration dismissed the charges. Once more the unjust oppression of enemies had seemed to extend the strength and scope of the Gospel. A few days later my congregation presented me with a token of confidence in their pastor. I was so happy at the time that I was ready to shake hands even with the reporters who had abused me. How kind they were, how well they understood me, how magnificently they took care of me, my people of the Brooklyn Tabernacle!
THE SIXTH MILESTONE
1879-1881
In the spring of 1879 I made a Gospel tour of England, Ireland, and Scotland. On a previous visit I had given a series of private lectures, under the management of Major Pond, and I had been more or less criticised for the amount of money charged the people to hear me. As I had nothing whatever to do with the prices of tickets to my lectures, which went to the managers who arranged the tour, this was something beyond my control. My personal arrangement with Major Pond was for a certain fixed sum. They said in Europe that I charged too much to be heard, that as a preacher of the Gospel I should have been more moderate. If the management had been my own I should not have been so greedy.
Because of this recollection and the regret it gave me, I decided to make another tour at my own expense, and preach without price in all the places I had previously visited as a lecturer. It was the most exhausting, exciting, remarkable demonstration of religious enthusiasm I have ever witnessed. It was an evangelistic yearning that could not be repeated in another life-time.
The entire summer was a round of Gospel meetings, overflow meetings, open-air meetings, a succession of scenes of blessing. From the time I arrived in Liverpool, where that same night I addressed two large a.s.semblages, till I got through after a monster gathering at Edinburgh, I missed but three Gospel appointments, and those because I was too tired to stand up. I preached ninety-eight times in ninety-three days.
With nothing but Gospel themes I confronted mult.i.tudes. A collection was always taken up at these gatherings for the benefit of local charities, feeble churches, orphan asylums and other inst.i.tutions. My services were gratuitous.
It was the most wonderful summer of evangelical work I was ever privileged to enjoy. There must have been much praying for me and my welfare, or no mortal could have got through with the work. In every city I went to, messages were pa.s.sed into my ears for families in America. The collection taken for the benefit of the Y.M.C.A. at Leeds was about $6,000. During this visit I preached in Scenery Chapel, London, in the pulpit where such consecrated souls as Rowland Hill and Newman Hall and James Sherman had preached. I visited the "Red Horse Hotel," of Stratford-on-Avon, where the chair and table used by Washington Irving were as interesting to me as anything in Shakespeare's cottage. The church where the poet is buried is over seven hundred years old.
The most interesting place around London to me is in Chelsea, where, on a narrow street, I entered the house of Thomas Carlyle. This great author was away from London at the time. Entering a narrow hall, on the left is the literary workshop, where some of the strongest thunderbolts of the world's literature have been forged. In the room, which has two front windows shaded from the prying street by two little red calico curtains, is a lounge that looks as though it had been made by an author unaccustomed to saw or hammer. On the wall were a few woodcuts in plain frames or pinned on the wall. Here was a photograph of Carlyle, taken one day, as a member of his family told me, when he had a violent toothache and could attend to nothing else, and yet posterity regards it as a favourite picture. There are only three copies of this photograph in existence. One was given to Carlyle, the other was kept by the photographer, and the third belongs to me. In long rough shelves was the library of the renowned thinker. The books were well worn with reading.
Many of them were books I never heard of. American literature was almost ignored; they were chiefly books written by Germans. There was an absence of theological books, excepting those of Thomas Chalmers, whose genius he worshipped. The carpets were old and worn and faded. He wished them to be so, as a perpetual protest against the world's sham. It did not appeal to me as a place of inspiration for a writer.
I returned to America impressed with the over-crowding of the British Isles, and the unsettled regions of our own country.