XV
AT CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, N. Y., FEBRUARY
26, 1903, UPON THE OCCASION OF THE BICENTENNIAL
CELEBRATION OF THE BIRTH
OF JOHN WESLEY
Mr. Chairman, ladies, and gentlemen:
I am glad to have the chance of addressing this representative
body of the great church which Wesley founded,
on the occasion of the commemoration of the two hundredth
anniversary of his birth. America, moreover, has
a peculiar proprietary claim on Wesley's memory, for it
is on our continent that the Methodist Church has received
its greatest development. In the days of our
Colonial life Methodism was not, on the whole, a great
factor in the religious and social life of the people. The
Congregationalists were supreme throughout most of New
England; the Episcopalians on the seaboard from New
York southward; while the Presbyterian congregations
were most numerous along what was then the entire
western frontier; and the Quaker, Catholic, and Dutch
Reformed churches each had developments in special
places. The great growth of the Methodist Church, like
the great growth of the Baptist Church, began at about
the time of the Revolutionary War. To-day my theme
is purely Methodism.
Since the days of the Revolution not only has the
Methodist Church increased greatly in the old communities
of the thirteen original States, but it has played a
peculiar and prominent part in the pioneer growth of our
country and has in consequence assumed a position of
immense importance throughout the vast region west of
the Alleghanies which has been added to our nation since
the days when the Continental Congress first met.
For a century after the Declaration of Independence the
greatest work of our people, with the exception only of the
work of self-preservation under Lincoln, was the work of
the pioneers as they took possession of this continent.
During that century we pushed westward from the Alleghanies
to the Pacific, southward to the Gulf and the Rio
Grande, and also took possession of Alaska. The work of
advancing our boundary, of pushing the frontier across forest
and desert and mountain chain, was the great typical
work of our nation; and the men who did it—the frontiersmen,
the pioneers, the backwoodsmen, plainsmen, mountain
men—formed a class by themselves. It was an iron
task, which none but men of iron soul and iron body could
do. The men who carried it to a successful conclusion
had characters strong alike for good and for evil. Their
rugged natures made them powers who served light or
darkness with fierce intensity; and together with heroic
traits they had those evil and dreadful tendencies which
are but too apt to be found in characters of heroic possibilities.
Such men make the most efficient servants of
the Lord if their abounding vitality and energy are
directed aright; and if misdirected their influence is
equally potent against the cause of Christianity and true
civilization. In the hard and cruel life of the border,
with its grim struggle against the forbidding forces of
wild nature and wilder men, there was much to pull the
frontiersman down. If left to himself, without moral
teaching and moral guidance, without any of the influences
that tend toward the uplifting of man and the subduing
of the brute within him, sad would have been his,
and therefore our, fate. From this fate we have been
largely rescued by the fact that together with the rest of
the pioneers went the pioneer preachers; and all honor
be given to the Methodists for the great proportion of
these pioneer preachers whom they furnished.
These preachers were of the stamp of old Peter Cartwright—men
who suffered and overcame every hardship
in common with their flock, and who in addition tamed
the wild and fierce spirits of their fellow-pioneers. It was
not a task that could have been accomplished by men
desirous to live in the soft places of the earth and to walk
easily on life's journey. They had to possess the spirit of
the martyrs; but not of martyrs who could merely suffer,
not of martyrs who could oppose only passive endurance
to wrong. The pioneer preachers warred against the
forces of spiritual evil with the same fiery zeal and energy
that they and their fellows showed in the conquest of the
rugged continent. They had in them the heroic spirit,
the spirit that scorns ease if it must be purchased by
failure to do duty, the spirit that courts risk and a life of
hard endeavor if the goal to be reached is really worth
attaining. Great is our debt to these men and scant the
patience we need show toward their critics. At times
they seemed hard and narrow to those whose training and
surroundings had saved them from similar temptations;
and they have been criticised, as all men, whether missionaries,
soldiers, explorers, or frontier settlers, are
criticised when they go forth to do the rough work that
must inevitably be done by those who act as the first
harbingers, the first heralds, of civilization in the world's
dark places. It is easy for those who stay at home in
comfort, who never have to see humanity in the raw, or
to strive against the dreadful naked forces which appear
clothed, hidden, and subdued in civilized life—it is easy
for such to criticise the men who, in rough fashion, and
amid grim surroundings, make ready the way for the
higher life that is to come afterwards; but let us all
remember that the untempted and the effortless should
be cautious in passing too heavy judgment upon their
brethren who may show hardness, who may be guilty of
shortcomings, but who nevertheless do the great deeds
by which mankind advances. These pioneers of Methodism
had the strong, militant virtues which go to the
accomplishment of such great deeds. Now and then
they betrayed the shortcomings natural to men of their
type; but their shortcomings seem small indeed when
we place beside them the magnitude of the work they
achieved.
And now, friends, in celebrating the wonderful growth
of Methodism, in rejoicing at the good it has done to the
country and to mankind, I need hardly ask a body like
this to remember that the greatness of the fathers becomes
to the children a shameful thing if they use it only
as an excuse for inaction instead of as a spur to effort for
noble aims. I speak to you not only as Methodists—I
speak to you as American citizens. The pioneer days
are over. We now all of us form parts of a great civilized
nation, with a complex industrial and social life and infinite
possibilities both for good and for evil. The instruments
with which, and the surroundings in which, we
work, have changed immeasurably from what they were
in the days when the rough backwoods preachers ministered
to the moral and spiritual needs of their rough
backwoods congregations. But if we are to succeed, the
spirit in which we do our work must be the same as the
spirit in which they did theirs. These men drove forward,
and fought their way upward, to success, because
their sense of duty was in their hearts, in the very marrow
of their bones. It was not with them something to
be considered as a mere adjunct to their theology, standing
separate and apart from their daily life. They had it
with them week days as well as Sundays. They did not
divorce the spiritual from the secular. They did not
have one kind of conscience for one side of their lives and
another for another.
If we are to succeed as a nation we must have the
same spirit in us. We must be absolutely practical, of
course, and must face facts as they are. The pioneer
preachers of Methodism could not have held their own
for a fortnight if they had not shown an intense practicality
of spirit, if they had not possessed the broadest and
deepest sympathy for, and understanding of, their fellow-men.
But in addition to the hard, practical common-sense
needed by each of us in life, we must have a lift
toward lofty things or we shall be lost, individually, and
collectively as a nation. Life is not easy, and least of all
is it easy for either the man or the nation that aspires to
do great deeds. In the century opening, the play of the
infinitely far-reaching forces and tendencies which go to
make up our social system bids fair to be even fiercer in
its activity than in the century which has just closed. If
during this century the men of high and fine moral sense
show themselves weaklings; if they possess only that
cloistered virtue which shrinks shuddering from contact
with the raw facts of actual life; if they dare not go down
into the hurly-burly where the men of might contend for
the mastery; if they stand aside from the pressure and
conflict; then as surely as the sun rises and sets all of
our great material progress, all the multiplication of the
physical agencies which tend for our comfort and enjoyment,
will go for naught and our civilization will become
a brutal sham and mockery. If we are to do as I believe
we shall and will do, if we are to advance in broad
humanity, in kindliness, in the spirit of brotherhood,
exactly as we advance in our conquest over the hidden
forces of nature, it must be by developing strength in
virtue and virtue in strength, by breeding and training
men who shall be both good and strong, both gentle and
valiant—men who scorn wrong-doing and who at the same
time have both the courage and the strength to strive
mightily for the right. Wesley accomplished so much for
mankind because he refused to leave the stronger, manlier
qualities to be availed of only in the interest of evil.
The church he founded has throughout its career been a
church for the poor as well as for the rich and has known
no distinction of persons. It has been a church whose
members, if true to the teachings of its founder, have
sought for no greater privilege than to spend and be spent
in the interest of the higher life, who have prided themselves,
not on shirking rough duty, but on undertaking it
and carrying it to a successful conclusion.
I come here to-night to greet you and to pay my tribute
to your past because you have deserved well of mankind,
because you have striven with strength and courage to
bring nearer the day when peace and justice shall obtain
among the peoples of the earth.
