University of Virginia Library

REV. HENRY B. BASCOM.

When this gentleman was in the full tide of his
pulpit popularity in the West, a young lady friend
of mine, in Kentucky, offered to take me in her
carriage to a camp-meeting, a few miles from her
residence, to hear the distinguished orator. I
gladly consented, both for the sake of the company
of my fair companion and for the pleasure of hearing
Mr. Bascom.

When a lad, I had heard this gentleman and the
lamented Summerfield, and I had been struck with
the dissimilar but great powers of both preachers.

Summerfield's eloquence was the summer morning's
sunshine, with its dew and flower; Bascom's
the lurid light and flashings of the tempest. One
preached the love and the other the terrors of the
Gospel. Summerfield's attractiveness seemed that
of another world, and his exceeding naturalness
and the absence of all apparent effort were remarkable.
Bascom was full of pith, and point, and
preparation; he poured forth sentence after sentence

of intense elaboration. To borrow, not incorrectly,
a phrase from the theatre in relation to
the stage efforts of Forrest, he “piled the agony
up” fearfully—so fearfully as to make the hearer
fear he would never get down, except by tumbling.
It was whip and spur from the word go. His style
and manner reminded one very much of Maryland's
most distinguished orator, Pinkney.

The almost beardless chin and pallid countenance
of Summerfield contrasted, again, with the
flashing eye, the ruddy cheek, and the black beard
of Bascom.

My lady friend, though a rigid Episcopalian,
was a great admirer of Mr. Bascom. She thought
he would look so well in the gown, and that he
would read the service so eloquently. She said
she felt like presenting him a gown, anyhow.
Mr. Wesley and Mr. Whitefield always preached
in a gown, and she could not see why he did not.
She was warm in her eulogies of his personal independence,
and dwelt particularly upon the fashion
of his toilet, and how becomingly his apparel fit
his manly form. She thought him the handsomest
man she had ever seen, and wondered why he
smoked so many cigars—and, above all, how he
could chew so much tobacco! She said that, unlike
every other popular preacher she had ever
known, he seemed to be indifferent to the admiration
of her sex, and that he certainly had no address

in ladies' society. This she liked, as she
thought it proved his sincerity. She then told the
anecdote of some rich lady (she was rich herself,
and wondered how any woman could so unsex herself),
who offered him her purse, heart, and hand;
and that his reply was, that “she had better give
her purse to the poor, her heart to God, and her
hand to him that asked for it.” I told her that I
had heard the same story of Summerfield and
others. She replied that Summerfield had too little
of this earth about him to inspire such an offer,
and was too gentle (“gentlemanly?” some one
asked; no, gentle, she repeated) to make such a
reply, though she thought it the very one for the
occasion—a Christian rebuke!

How she delighted to talk of the orator, and she
was so proud that he was a Kentuckian. She said
the Conference had kept him for years itinerating
about in the “knobs” of Kentucky, to take the
pride out of him, particularly the pride of dress,
but that he would make his advent from the wilds
into Frankfort or Lexington, with as exquisite a
toilet, as if he had just left the shop of a fashionable
tailor. She said he had been taken to task
for his dress by some Quarterly Conference, and
that he had replied to them that if they should cut
a hole through a blanket, and put it over him, that
he should still be Henry B. Bascom; that dress
was no part of his religion, and if it was of theirs,

it was well for them to look to their habiliments;
that he had no idea of what a religious hat, or a
religious pair of boots was. Here, again, he was
in contrast with Summerfield, who, upon some
“weak brother's” finding fault with a seal he wore,
abolished it, and wore nothing but the ribbon.

In this pleasant chat, for the lady talked well,
and in fact the Kentucky ladies generally have
more conversational talent than any other ladies
in the Union, we approached the camp. It was
pitched on the gentle slope of a hill, at the foot of
which a broad branch rippled, and the white tents
and the crowd of people presented a most picturesque
appearance. We were late, for we heard
the bold tones of the orator ringing through the
woods in the highest note of declamation. We
thought we should have been early, for it was understood
that it was at night the orator was to address
the multitude. The sun was about half an
hour from his setting, and we hurried from the
carriage to the place of worship.

A dense crowd occupied the whole space, not
only in front of the pulpit, but all around it, and,
with my fair friend leaning upon my arm, we had
to take a stand on the outskirts, and catch the
intellectual manna, which fell in the wilderness, as
we might. We, however, heard and saw the orator
distinctly. His appearance, manner, and eloquence
were magnificent and sublime, as, with the Bible

raised aloft in his hand, he described the spread of
the Gospel in heathen lands. We listened, like the
rest of the audience, in rapt attention for ten or
fifteen minutes, when, as he laid the Bible down
and paused for a moment, my fair friend at my
side exclaimed, in a glow of admiration:—

“He is, indeed, a prince in Israel.”

And I thought so, too. In one bright spot the
setting sun was flashing through the quivering
leaves, throwing over his breast, and brow, and
countenance, a halo of living light.

The orator gloriously alluded to the departing
luminary, whose rising beams, he said, enabled the
missionary to read the Word of God to the heathen
of the farthest East in his own language, and whose
setting beams flashed upon the blazonry of the
Bible, bearing civilization and Christianity to the
farthest West.

Mr. Bascom has been brought particularly to my
mind in reading a volume of sermons which he has
lately published. It appears, by his preface, that
he “commenced preaching when he was but sixteen
years old.”

One would not think so, to read his sermons. He
has none of the cant (I use the word not disrespectfully)
of the trained preacher about him—nothing
of “mere pulpit patois,” to use his own phrase, in
speaking in this connection. He seems studiously
to avoid it. In his preface he says:—

“The author has long been impressed with the
idea, perhaps he should say conviction, that the
force and value of pulpit instruction are greatly
lessened by the restraints and mannerism of pulpit
style, arising mainly, perhaps, from undue attachments
to creeds, confessions, and church formularies,
as the tests and standards of truth and
uniformity among different denominations of Christians,
and the vicious standards of critical judgments
already referred to. The natural, manly,
and varied freedom of expression found in the
Bible, and preserved, in greater or less degree, in
all its translations into different languages, is laid
aside, and gives place to the staidness and precision
of an exclusive technical phraseology, and
often having all the essential characteristics of a
mere pulpit patois. And on this account alone,
with or without reason, the pulpit too often
becomes to the hearer a mere limbo of commonplace,
from which he turns away with indifference,
if not disgust.”

These remarks are strong, but they are truthful,
and Mr. Bascom has not certainly fallen into
the error. With the hackneyed phrases too often
heard in the pulpit, he has nothing to do whatever.
Though he is often too ornate, and too fond of
antithesis and alliteration, it is evident that the
vast storehouse of literature, both sacred and profane,
has furnished his supply. He makes few

quotations, even from the Bible, except when he is
establishing some very particular point by Divine
authority; but he boldly and bravely expatiates
upon the subject as it strikes his own mind. The
volume before us is full of beauties, and it certainly
has some startling defects. Almost all speakers
have some pet words, which they drag in upon all
occasions, and Mr. Bascom is no small transgressor
in this way. He is fond, very, of the words “antagonism”
and “adumbrating;” and he has taken
the liberty of coining words, too, passing his counterfeits
with the king's English, for which Dr.
Johnson would find him guilty without benefit of
clergy. Some of his phrases, too, are against all
taste; for instance: “The smile of infidelity
transformed to a groan in the very act of parturition,”
&c.

It is to be hoped that Mr. Bascom will never
give birth to such a phrase as that again, but let it
die like the “smile of infidelity” aforesaid. But
away with fault-finding—this volume of “Sermons
from the Pulpit” abounds with aphoristic thoughts
and pages of burning eloquence. Speaking of the
duties of the preacher, he says: “He should teach
all, with unwearied urgency of appeal, that life is
an orbit, through which mortality can pass but
once; that it is but an hour-glass, and that every
sand ought to be a pious deed or a virtuous
thought.”

Again, he says: “Honest severity in the pulpit
is like the lightning of heaven—it makes holy what
it scathes. It resembles the thunderbolt, passing
through tainted exhalations but to purify them.”
“Every day you live without repentance, say, with
the startled emperor of antiquity, `I have lost a
day,' and say, `with the blessing of God, I will
never lose another.'” Speaking of heaven, he
says: “Ours may be the only prodigal in the
great family of worlds; and, after due time and
trial, all may meet in this vast region.”

But I must not make this article too long.
Pages of great beauty, as has been said, might be
quoted from these “Sermons from the Pulpit,”
with the disfigurement here and there of a tortured
phrase, or a noun pressed to do duty as a
verb, “adumbrating” upon us in “antagonism”
to all taste; but, after all, “de gustibus,” &c.
And, again, after all, the preacher has been one
of the great lights of his church in his day, without
one particle of cant in his conduct or character,
and as little “pulpit patois” in his preachings.
He is a frank, fearless, and consistent Christian,
with this high praise, that his piety is commended
most by those who know him best.

Possessing the power to draw the unthinking
and the foolishly-fashionable to the Methodist
meeting-house, with the learned and the pious of
every shade of opinion and variety of creed, and

of impressing multitudes, not only with the force
of his talents, but with the truth of his faith, he
has proved to the world that a preacher may present
himself in society, in dress and address, an
accomplished, high-toned, and high-bred gentleman,
and yet be a Puritan in his morals and conduct;
nay, more, a Methodist.

DEATH OF BISHOP BASCOM.

We learn with great regret the death of Bishop
Henry B. Bascom, one of the Bishops of the
Methodist Episcopal Church South, who died on
Sunday last, at the residence of the Rev. Mr.
Stevinson, in Louisville, Ky., where he had been
a long time ill.

Bishop Bascom's illness arose from a bilious
fever caught in Missouri some time since, while on
his first tour of duty in his office of bishop.

Bishop Bascom's place in the Church South
cannot easily be filled. He was a man of great
energy, of great talents, of great fearlessness, and,
in the matter of the church difficulty between the
North and South, having taken sides with the
South, he stood forth her admitted leader. The
celebrated pamphlet on the subject, setting forth
the grounds which the South meant to maintain in
the premises, was from the pen of Bishop Bascom,

and was full of point, argument, and energetic
declamation.

Bishop Bascom was also editor of the Review,
which was published under the auspices of the
Methodist Church in the West, and he contributed
many powerful articles to it. But it was as a
pulpit orator that Bishop Bascom shone. His
style as a writer was too stilty and too ornate; it
wanted ease and naturalness. He was always for
saying keen things, and wanted repose of style, if
the expression may be used. This same fault, in
a measure, followed him into the pulpit. He was
never content unless he was in the upper region,
like the spirit of the storm, wielding the lightning
and speaking in the thunder. That varied gracefulness
and self-command which distinguish his
early and his fast friend, Mr. Clay, that gracefulness
which, like the swallow, now skims the lake
and now darts into the cloud, Mr. Bascom had
not.

He wanted naturalness. He blazed, and corruscated,
and startled, but he seldom melted his audience.
Wonder and admiration often impressed them,
but the tear seldom followed. But in denunciation,
in scorn, in the terrors of the law, he was fearful.
He could seize infidelity by the throat and shake
the life out of it; or he could hurl against it the
wrath of Divine vengeance until it would call on
the mountains to cover it from an angry judge:

but he could not melt it into hopeful and penitent,
yet trusting, tears. He had great elevation and
expansion of mind, and delighted to expatiate with
unfettered and uncircumscribed wing. He loved
to dwell upon the beatitude of the saved, or the
unutterable misery of the lost; and, in this last
category, the heedless, and the reckless, and the
criminal, would look as if the clinched fist of the
preacher was stamping on their foreheads their
inevitable doom.

Bishop Bascom was a man of remarkable personal
beauty and manliness. He had the ample
chest which almost all orators have; a rounded
neck supported a head of classic mould; thin, dark
hair, cut close, shaded not at all his ample forehead,
which projected like a wall; his eyes were
of dazzling blackness, and quailed not before
power, position, or wealth; on the contrary, they
quailed before him.

He has been heard to say that the only eye he
ever met with, which made him feel its power, was
that of Aaron Burr; that, on one occasion, when
that fallen spirit was pointed out to him in New
York, he stopped and gazed at him with a curiosity
which forgot its courtesy, when the offended and
piercing glance which Burr cast on him caused him
to pass on, hurriedly and abashed. Bishop Bascom
had a brilliant color, indicating the highest health,
and, at the same time, a temperament of a bilious

tendency. It has been often remarked that he
looked very much like Mr. Webster, though he was
a much handsomer man, without that look of
massive intellectuality in which the great constitutional
expounder surpasses all other men.

Bishop Bascom was remarkably fastidious in his
toilet, and, like Whitefield, set off his person to
advantage.

Many anecdotes are told of him, and some of the
more rigid of his church, in this matter; but he
did not obey the precept of St. Paul, and paid no
respect to their “weakness.” He was fond of
telling the story that an old Dutch Methodist, who
did not know him, and at whose house he was to
stop on his way to fulfil his appointment, said to
him, on learning who he was: “Well, if I had
loaded my rifle to shoot a Methodist preacher, I
never should have snapped at you!”

There was none of that preciseness about him
which is so often remarked in the bearing of a
minister; on the contrary, it almost seemed, so
marked was his bearing to the contrary, that he
somewhat affected a don't-care of manner. In his
pulpit efforts he avoided everything like what is
called cant, and what he called patois. All his
life, he said, he had endeavored to avoid it; he
certainly succeeded. He seemed like a statesman
or lawyer, whom the stern reflection of Paul, “Woe
is me if I preach not the Gospel of Christ,” had

driven, duty-called, into the pulpit. And there he
stood, and there gloriously he fulfilled his mission.
It was Methodism in earnest to hear Bishop Bascom
preach, and Methodism which Chesterfield
would have been compelled to respect, if but for
the high and courtly, yet Christian bearing of its
advocate. He was the son of thunder, and, like
St. Paul, he bore himself to the enemies of his faith
bravely, yet with a touch of consummate address,
like the apostle before Festus. Bishop Bascom
has fulfilled his mission; he has been true to himself
and to his church, and to its Great Head, and
it is earnestly hoped that some biographer may be
selected by his friends, capable of doing justice to
his memory.