Memoirs of William Nelson Pendleton, D.D., rector of Latimer parish, Lexington, Virginia; brigadier-general c.s.a.; chief of artillery, army of northern Virginia. |
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| L. | CHAPTER L. |
 | CHAPTER L. Memoirs of William Nelson Pendleton, D.D., |  |
CHAPTER L.
GOLDEN WEDDING—ILLNESS—WORK TO THE LAST—DEATH.
In July of 1881 Dr. and Mrs. Pendleton celebrated their
golden wedding. It was an occasion to be remembered for the
happy thankfulness which irradiated the faces of the handsome,
aged couple, and the harmony and kindliness of the large concourse
assembled to congratulate them. A touching service was
held by their friend and cousin, Dr. Robert Nelson, returned
from China for good, and several persons were present who had
witnessed the marriage fifty years before; while a great many
letters of congratulation and a number of costly and substantial
presents gave evidence of wide-spread affectionate good-will in
Lexington and elsewhere.
Rev. Dr. Hoge to Dr. Pendleton.
"My dear Dr. Pendleton,—I have just read with deep
emotion the interesting account in The State of this afternoon of
your 'golden wedding.' Had I known in time that such an
anniversary would be celebrated on the 15th I would have sent
my hearty congratulations earlier. But now will you not permit
me to unite with your friends in Virginia and all over the country,
with Mrs. Preston, in saying,—
Who fain would twine my bit of spray
Into your wreath, God's benison
Upon your Golden Wedding Day'?
Bishop Lee, of Delaware, to Dr. Pendleton.
"My dear Dr. Pendleton,—Please accept for Mrs. Pendleton
and yourself my sincere congratulations on your being permitted
to celebrate your golden wedding.
"Fifty years of wedded happiness is a boon granted to very
few in this uncertain world.
"Wishing you both a very pleasant occasion, and a continuance
of divine blessings, I am, very truly, yours,
General Humphreys, U.S.A., to Dr. Pendleton.
"Dear General Pendleton,—I have this moment received
the invitation of yourself and Mrs. Pendleton to your golden
wedding on Friday next.
"Appreciating fully the delicate compliment this invitation
conveys, I regret exceedingly my inability to be present. Let
me, however, offer Mrs. Pendleton and yourself my hearty congratulations
at the golden return of a day that marks the great
event of one's life, and my wishes for a long continuance of
happy days to yourselves and household.
Honorable A. J. B. Beresford Hope to Dr. Pendleton.
"My dear Dr. Pendleton,—Many thanks for your touching
remembrance. All happiness to you and to Mrs. Pendleton for
many more years to come.
"For me there is no golden wedding in prospect, for she with
whom I had hoped to keep it was called away this spring, and
has left me thoroughly desolate. God be thanked, Paradise is
near and duty survives, though happiness is dead.
Thomas Nelson Page to General Pendleton.
"My dear Uncle and Aunt,—I had hoped to be with you on
the 15th, and give in person my congratulations and good
wishes for the past and the future. It is impossible, however, for
me to get away at this time, so I am forced to content myself
with a note. Although I may not be able to express myself so
satisfactorily in this manner as I could were I present, I am
sure that you have not now to learn that every good wish I can
find in my heart is yours. I find upon glancing back over my
own life that my single valuable possession—my education—is
due to your kindness, and the gratitude which I feel is not diminished
by the fact that two generations of my house are indebted
to you in the same way. Besides this, the kindness and love for
which I am indebted to you place me under an obligation which
I can never repay. So far, however, as good wishes go towards
paying it I give you all I have, for I hope that the remaining
years, during which you may be spared to each other and all of
us, may bring you as much happiness and enable you to do as
much good as all the half-century which you have just finished.
I cannot say more, but I send you my best love for now and
always, and am your affectionate nephew,
"Thomas Nelson Page."
To Dr. and Mrs. Pendleton on their golden wedding day.
Who stand amid the smiles and tears
Of friends who gather here to view
Your wedded path of fifty years,
And in your youth and beauty bright
Might kneel as in your early prime
A Bride and Bridegroom here to-night,—
The past with all its joy and pain,
And venture for, you know not what,
Another fifty years again?
Of all your past is fixed secure:
A love-troth as supreme as this
Is safe as heaven is, and as sure!
There might be less of earth's alloy;
There could not—could not, anywhere,
Be more of life's divinest joy!
When the divided burdens fall
Half on each heart? 'Tis scarce a cross
When both together bear it all.
Fair fame, true faith, contentment, love,
Children, and friends, and home, and, more
Than all, the heaven that waits above.
Who fain would twine my bit of spray
Into your wreath, God's benison
Upon your Golden Wedding Day!
July 13, 1881."
Judge J. N. Lea to General Pendleton.
"Dear General Pendleton,—I regret exceedingly that owing
to a recent attack of illness, from which I have not yet recovered,
it would be imprudent for me to be out in such threatening
weather, and I am therefore deprived of the pleasure of paying
my respects and tendering my congratulations to you on the return
of your seventy-second birthday. One who has filled so
large a sphere of usefulness as you have is well entitled to those
congratulations. Is not the man to be congratulated who at the
age of seventy-two years finds himself in relatively good health,
surrounded by appreciating friends, from whom he receives
honor, love, obedience, 'and all that should accompany old age,'
and can look back upon half a century of useful labor, spent in
the service of his Maker and of his fellow-men? . . .
Dr. Pendleton to his sister, Mrs. Mildred Pendleton, Augusta,
Georgia.
"Dear Sister Mildred,—If any one had told me, when I
got your letter in reply to mine, some six months or so ago, that
I should have let all this time pass without writing to you again,
I could not have believed a word of it, and should certainly have
set him down as no prophet, and might even have regarded his
suggestion as a sort of charge to call for denial. Yet so it has
occurred; and while much work to do, and being at times not
altogether well, constitute a sort of excuse for such delay in performing
a duty which is really pleasant when actually set about,
I have to confess that the tardiness is a fault for which you have
a right to blame me, and for which I must try to make amends
by guarding against it in the brief future before us.
"A letter from Mary Williams, in Richmond, the other day,
told of one she had received from you, which let them know that
you are in not uncomfortable health for a grandmother approaching
fourscore, and this is a gratifying piece of news to Anzolette
and all the rest with me. For, though my pen is so slow to move
towards you and yours, far otherwise is it with my heart. In all my
regular devotions, day by day, you are distinctly remembered with
tender love and earnest intercessions, embracing, too, all of yours.
"When you let us hear from you, tell us as distinctly as you
can about each of your children and grandchildren.
"As for myself and mine, so much have we to be thankful for
that I hardly know how to speak of it. Anzolette keeps in the
main so well. My strength and spirit so kept up to serve my
parish with the loving approval of the people in general. Our
daughters kept in health and employed usefully and happily.
And creature comforts abundant, even during the Arctic weather
lately upon us,—thermometer twenty degrees below zero! Yet
our home delightful! Mercy far beyond all we could justly expect.
And though, like our Master, poor, yet with a little provision
—not less than wonderfully ordered by Providence—for our
five daughters, to help them against want and to continue useful
when their mother and I go to the better country. Should Anzo
and I live till the I5th of next July, our golden wedding comes.
A little over a week ago—Sunday, December 26—I numbered
bless us, and bring us to a happy meeting in Paradise."
". . . To learn of yourself and all of you, as you fully mentioned
in your last, was a satisfaction. That you were still able
to get to church, generally on Sunday and sometimes in the
week, called for my thanks to the Sustainer of your strength.
Approaching fourscore as you are, to be thus supported beyond
the threescore and ten term should awaken especial thankfulness.
"Anzolette and I are both thus favored and called upon for
peculiar gratitude, getting smartly beyond that term as we are.
But you are some eight years my senior, and while at middle life
that interval seems a comparative trifle, it is towards the latter end
found a serious matter.
"That we have objects of love to cling to, rendering life more
or less desirable even after most of our immediate generation are
gone,—and that we are privileged to expect with glad hope our
great change,—is one of the striking instances of our Father
making all things work together for good to them that love Him.
"You have probably seen in some of the papers accounts of
our Diocesan Council in Danville. Anzolette would not undertake
the journey, but our daughter Rose went with me. Owing
to interference with canal travel from here to Lynchburg, we went
round by Charlottesville, and spent a day or two with Virginia and
Dr. Robert W. Nelson. William Nelson, of 'Oakland' and Rev.
Dr. Bob, missionary, returned from China, were at Virginia's with
us, and went with me and Rose to Danville. George Dame, who
married Uncle Carter Page's daughter Mary Maria, is rector of
the church in Danville, and has been, to good purpose, for forty
years. Three sons, clergymen, were with him in the service on
the opening day of the Council, when his handsome new church
was consecrated. A rare spectacle among men! George Dame,
though perhaps looking older, lacks three years of being as old
as myself. He still works actively. The man now alive who has
on his shoulders the heaviest weight—England's prime minister,
Gladstone—is just one day younger than I am. Colonel Edmund
Pendleton, a distant shoot from our old stem, and a leading
lawyer of this region, living here now, is, I reckon, fifty-odd,
to eighty-nine, another to ninety-eight; and there is, within a
stone's-throw of us, an old lady over one hundred, who recently
walked on the street! For neither you nor ourselves ask I so
to linger, but that all the days of our appointed time we may be
enabled to work and wait till our change come, and then find it
far better to depart and be with Christ."
In the summer of 1882 a long and desperate illness brought
Dr. Pendleton to the verge of the grave. This sickness served
to show the love of the congregation and community for their
old pastor and friend, and night and day his family and physicians
were encouraged and assisted by kind attention and faithful
nursing from different gentlemen. God blessed their efforts and
prayers and restored him to even more than his usual health, so
that he was able to resume his services in the sanctuary.
To Mrs. Mildred Pendleton, Augusta, Georgia.
"My dear Sister,—You will be gratified to see my handwriting
after so long a time. For between two to three months I
have been kept from almost every kind of exertion of mind or
body by medical direction in consequence of a prostrating illness,
which in the earlier portion of that time was for days expected
every hour to end my earthly life. At length, however,
I am entering upon accustomed duties, and gladly, among them,
at once send you this Christmas greeting, having just directed to
you a Christmas card.
"Although you have reached the term pronounced by Supreme
authority 'but labor and sorrow,' and next Tuesday, 26th, completes
for me only three years over threescore and ten, you
are, in some respects, I reckon, quite as active and reliable as I
am. The visitations occasionally sent upon me of suspended
consciousness for a few minutes, although seeming to result in
slight harm, occasion constant concern and watchfulness on the
part of my home people lest at some time especially unsuitable
a visitation of the kind occur. Then, whether connected with
that infirmity or not I do not know, I am quite uncomfortably
deaf, so as to miss a chief part of conversation where I am and
or pulpit. And besides, what is still more serious, to remedy
failing memory, I have to be far more studious and otherwise
constant in employment towards retaining accuracy of knowledge
requisite for a teacher, above all, of saving, revealed truth.
Still, the Lord enables me to retain a good degree of strength
of body and, I trust, of mind, to rest refreshingly and to
enjoy sustaining food, and to share cheerfulness of disposition
perhaps beyond the average. And I am granted a very comforting
measure of confiding and affectionate esteem, on the part
of the community as well as of the congregation under my pastorate.
For all this my wish is to be truly grateful, while committing
unanxiously my earthly as well as my eternal future to
unerring goodness in Christ our Saviour. Anzolette experiences,
too, infirmities from wearing years, though also sustained by
blessings and hopes. We are through Providential kindness
comforted with moderate means, and altogether the lot granted
us is full of goodness and mercy.
"And now, dear sister, to yourself, as the closing time comes,
experience is given, I pray and trust, of the sure hope on high.
The Lord still keep and bless you and bring us to a happy
meeting in Paradise.
Rev. Dr. Robert Nelson to Dr. Pendleton.
"My dear Cousin,—It is in due course to begin by wishing
you and all your household not merely 'the compliments of the
season in the phrase, "A Happy New Year,"' but within this
outside wrapper are enclosed our heartiest and most sincere desire
that the best of the Father's blessings, and the richest of the
Saviour's love, and the most gracious gifts of the Spirit may
abound to you in the year on which we are permitted to enter.
To you two especially, my dear and venerable cousins, as compared
with whom, though past my threescore, I still feel but
a child, I tender my warm congratulations, with most earnest
wishes that at your eventide you may have light glowing."
Dr. Pendleton was by nature benevolent and sympathetic, and
the trials and experience of his long and varied life had deepened
and strengthened these characteristics. His own sorrows taught
him to understand the griefs of others and to administer to them
gracious consolation; from sickness and suffering he became
more compassionate for the bodily ailments of his fellows, and
more tolerant of all their infirmities of temper or character;
chastened and trained in the school of God's discipline, he learned
that Christ-like forbearance towards human frailty which loves
the sinner while loathing his sin. This heart-felt sympathy made
him the friend and consoler not of his own flock alone, but of
all who were in trouble. To hear of suffering or trial anywhere
in the community was to him an immediate summons to render
what aid or comfort he could, and everywhere his presence and
voice seemed to carry something of his Master's strength and
consolation. His desire to help and benefit all around him led
him sometimes into incongruous companionships. In his morning
and evening walks he not infrequently joined himself to one
and another working-man going to and fro to his daily task, and
while chatting pleasantly on the business and news of the day,
found opportunity to speak some word of Christian admonition
or suggestion. So much was he wont in this apparently casual
intercourse to interest and influence for good persons looked
upon by others as utterly godless and impracticable, that he
might be seen walking and talking with an avowed unbeliever or
miserable drunkard, and upon being laughingly told by his
daughters that it would go hard with him to be judged by the
company he kept, his smiling reply was, "Poor fellow, he can't
hurt me, and I may do him some good". Such cordial intercourse
with his fellows gained for him the confidence of all who
knew him, and individuals who would not suffer an approach
from other men on the subject of religion would listen respectfully
to his kind and faithful admonitions. On the morning when
the tolling bell announced his sudden death a journeyman-carpenter
stopped one of the vestrymen, and after expressing his
sympathy for the family said, "He was a friend to everybody.
He often stopped and chatted with me, and he never spoke to a
man without doing him good." Not long after this a poor sewing-woman
told his daughter, "If I miss him so much I don't
much of him," was the reply. "Well, I didn't," said the woman;
"but you know he passed by my house three or four times every
day, and I never heard his soldier step or the click of his cane
on the pavement without feeling that there was one good man in
the world who would always help me if I went to him. Oh, I
do miss him dreadfully!"
The end of this life of labor and beneficence came suddenly
and without pain. January of 1883 was cold and stormy, and
there was sickness and privation among some of the poor in
whom Dr. Pendleton was specially interested. On Sunday, the
14th, he preached as usual in the morning, and after dinner took
a long, cold walk over ice and snow to visit a poor family, and
carry to them material as well as spiritual comfort. On Monday,
15th, he was unusually well and bright, and not only performed
his customary duties, but, to fulfil a promise made to his wife,
began preparation for the next Sunday. At nine o'clock he
stopped writing at his desk, chatted cheerfully with his family
until ten, had family prayers, and retired. A few minutes after
eleven his daughters were summoned by a call from their mother,
and found him gasping and struggling for breath. He never
roused, and in a moment all of this life was over.
His funeral was the first service held in the church, the completion
of which he had so ardently desired, and a few months
afterwards General Lee's monument was unveiled. By unremitting
exertion at home and great liberality elsewhere both
these memorials were brought to a gracious completeness; but
he who had done so much and longed so eagerly for such a consummation
was not permitted to witness it. God called His faithful
servant to come up higher to the temple not made with hands.
This record of his life is fitly closed in the words of his vestry:
"A student from his youth, learned in theological lore, an
accomplished and ripe scholar, and well versed in the exact
sciences, he came to his sacred profession well equipped for its
difficult duties, and his writings and discourses remain to attest
his high literary culture and evangelical creed.
"It is but simple justice to say of him that he was an humble,
obedient, and devoted servant of God, a Christian of great sincerity
Lord Jesus Christ, 'thoroughly furnished unto all good works.'
Ever diligent in the work of his Master, loyal to his convictions,
courageous in meeting all the responsibilities of his high office,
with an ear quick to hear and alert, ever responsive to the calls
of suffering humanity, firm but charitable in reproving, given to
hospitality, and in his own daily walk setting before his people a
noted example of godly living,—the memory of his virtues and
of his good deeds rests as a blessing and a benefaction on the
parish which he so long and so faithfully served. Severely
afflicted with disease in the closing years of his ministry and
his life, death walked beside him as he trod the path of his daily
duties, but not to disturb the serenity of his soul or chill the
ardor of his zeal. It but gave him opportunity to take pleasant
glimpses into that blessed future which lay plain to his eye in the
eternal domain beyond the grave.
"The last day, and almost the last hour, of his earthly existence
found him still employed in the active service of his Divine
Master, and he fell, as he desired to do, with his Christian armor
on. He expected his summons not with presumptuous boldness,
but with submissive and cheerful calmness, and we feel comforted
in the belief that, when it came, he was ready to depart, 'having
the testimony of a good conscience, in the communion of the
Catholic Church, in the confidence of a certain faith, in the comfort
of a reasonable, religious, and holy hope, in favor with God,
and in perfect charity with the world.'
"The massive and beautiful church edifice in which we are now
met, the completion of which is largely due to his persistent
energy, is, perhaps, the best monument to him, and it must be
thought a happy circumstance that its entire completion was
coincident in time with the close of his well-rounded life."[1]
Mrs. Pendleton survived her husband only a twelvemonth,
passing away almost exactly as he had done,—suddenly in the
night on January 15, 1884. Their mortal remains repose, in the
hope of a joyful resurrection, in the cemetery at Lexington
beside the graves of their son, grandson, and son-in-law.
| CHAPTER L. Memoirs of William Nelson Pendleton, D.D., | |