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N the 6th of September, 1859, I bade good-by to my brothers and their New York offices, to my home and friends in Brooklyn, to my profession and my professional ambitions, and with my wife and child took the steamer for Portland, and thence the railway and stage-coach to Farmington. My father and his wife, my stepmother, were still at Fewacres when I arrived there, and the five weeks during which he remained there I took as a vacation. He was very fond of landscape architecture of a simple sort, and I worked with him on the grounds, making paths, trimming up trees and shrubs and the like, and doing only some incidental reading. But these five weeks with him were among the most profitable of my life. For he not only gave me some specific counsels which have remained with me ever since, which I am glad to repeat here for the benefit of others, especially young ministers and theological students, but also, without my realizing it then, as I have realized it since, he laid for me, by his thoughts, the foundations of much of my theological thinking, and, by his personal character and influence, the foundations of much of my religious experience.

"If I were a preacher," he said, "I would make my first sermon of any convenient length. The next Sunday I would make it five minutes shorter, and I would continue to take off five minutes until the people complained that my sermons were too short. Then I would take five minutes off from that, and the result should give me my standard." This counsel was emphasized by the saying of a Methodist minister to me when I was ordained in the following spring, “ I have resolved not to attempt to make myself immortal by being eternal."

I never followed literally my father's counsel; but I have acted in accordance with its spirit. When, in 1887, I was invited to undertake the supply of the pulpit of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, on the death of Henry Ward Beecher, I was quite conscious that I never could preach as great Copyright, 1914, by the Outlook Company.

sermons as Mr. Beecher, but I knew that I could preach shorter ones. He usually preached from an hour to an hour and a quarter; and the congregation was surprised to find his successor's sermons half that length very rarely over thirty-five minutes, and not infrequently twenty-five. What congregations have said behind my back I do not know; but many have complained to me that my sermons were too short, and I have always regarded the criticism as a compli

ment.

My father's second counsel respected the method of a preacher's approach to his congregation. "It is," he said, "a principle of mechanics that, if an object is at one point and you wish to take it to another point, you must carry it through all the intermediate points. Remember that this is also a principle in morals. If your congregation is at one point and you wish to bring them to another point, you must carry them through all the intermediate points."

The minister must be enough of an opportunist to adapt his teaching to the audience which he addresses. If a locomotive were to

start at sixty miles an hour, it would break the coupling and leave the train standing on the track. This is what has often happened to radical preachers. I have no moral respect for the preacher who is contented to be a phonograph and repeat from the pulpit on Sunday the sentiments and experiences which he has gathered from his congregation during the week. But I have also scant respect for the preacher who makes no study of the sentiments, opinions, or even prejudices of his congregation, and excuses his laziness by quoting the text: "And thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God. And they, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear (for they are a rebellious house), yet shall know that there hath been a prophet among them." I believe that the pulpit is the freest platform in America-freer than either the editorial page or the political rostrum. But he who would profit by that freedom and make it profitable to others as well must study his congregation and treat

their preconceived opinions with respect. He cannot expect that they will understand him if he has made no attempt to understand them, nor that he can in half an hour conduct them through all the transitions of thought which it has taken him months, and perhaps years, of study to make for himself.

My father's third counsel respected the cause of sectarian differences and the secret of Christian unity. "I am convinced," he said, "that nine-tenths of the controversies which have agitated the religious world have been controversies about words, and I rather think the other tenth has been also."

I thought at the time that this was rather extreme, but an incident occurring in my life many years after led me to think that it is almost literally true. I told the story to an agnostic, and accompanied it with a qualification. "There is one difference," I said to him, "which I do not think is merely a difference about words-that between the mystic and the rationalist. The rationalist believes that we can know nothing which we cannot perceive through the senses-cannot see, hear, touch, or smell; the mystic believes that we have direct and immediate knowledge of an invisible world. I am a mystic." "And I," he replied, "am a rationalist; I believe that all our knowledge is derived through the senses. But I believe that there is a great domain which we enter through the faith faculty." And I said to myself, "My father was more nearly right than I thought. What I call knowledge my agnostic friend calls domain."

Acting on this principle, it has become a second nature to me to avoid all the technical terms of scholastic theology, what one of my friends calls "the patois of Canaan ”—such words as Trinity, Atonement, Vicarious Sacrifice, Regeneration, Decrees, Foreordination, Plenary Inspiration, and the like. These words are battle-flags, and the moment the word is raised prejudice rushes in to attack it, and prejudice, often no more intelligent, rushes in to defend it. In consequence the religious teacher finds himself involved in a theological tournament, which never was profitable, and in our time is not even interesting. The adoption of these two fundamental principles-an understanding of the audience coupled with a real respect for their convictions, an honest endeavor to adapt my teaching not to their likes but to their needs, and an instinctive omission of all words which have come to be battle-flags

has enabled me to preach Divine Sovereignty to Methodists, Orthodoxy to Unitarians, the Civil Rights of the Negroes to Southerners, Industrial Democracy to capitalists, and the leadership of Jesus Christ to Jews. How far I may have converted them to my way of thinking I do not know; but I have at least got a respectful hearing for my convictions.

Whether it was at this time or earlier that my father gave me the following counsel I am not sure. "Lyman," he said, "I have resolved always to have plenty of money.”

Myself. That's easier said than done, father.

Father. Not at all. It is perfectly easily done.

Myself (incredulous). I should like to know how.

Father. Always spend less than you earn. And I remember the concrete illustration he gave to me: "If I landed at the Battery from Europe with ten cents in my pocket, I would walk home rather than spend six cents to ride uptown in an omnibus."

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To my father's counsel I have added, Spend your money after you have earned it, not before."

This counsel has kept me from dishonorable debt, although at times my income has been so small that it has been necessary to forego myself and to deny to my family all luxuries and some comforts. There was one winter when my wife, with two little children to care for, was her own cook, housemaid, and nurse, and, on occasion, dressmaker and milliner, and I sawed and split all the wood for our winter's fuel, though I kept up the sawing only till I had paid for the saw and the saw-horse. At such times this resolve to incur no dishonorable debt has spurred me on to add to my regular income by extra work outside my profession. Not all debt is dishonorable. But all debt incurred without assured resources with which to repay it is dishonorable, unless the creditor knows the circumstances, and, for friendship's sake or for profit, is willing to take the risk.

But much more important than these specific counsels was the general religious influence of my father, who was the only teacher of theology under whose personal influence I have ever come. It is never possible for a teacher to know from whom he has derived the various threads which have entered into and compose the fabric of his teaching. Nor could I tell now what or how much I received from those five weeks of association with my father.

But as I have recently re-read certain of his religious writings, I have been anew made sensible how much of my theology—that is, of my philosophy of religion-has been derived from him; I hope also something of the spirit of devotion which vitalized all his religious thinking. I make no attempt here to give any systematic account of my father's theology; I attempt only to illustrate by brief quotations some of the essential articles of his religious faith which I have largely, though unconsciously, borrowed from him.

He was a liberal in theology, but in opinion and in spirit profoundly evangelical. In 1838, three years after my birth, he described in a letter to his mother a work which he had projected but which he never wrote. "I should design," he wrote, "to take up in it the subject of the way of salvation through Jesus Christ as an atoning sacrifice for sin, and the other doctrines of grace connected with it, as they have been held by the most devoted Christians in all ages, in contrast with the views secretly or openly maintained by Unitarians and others, of salvation through the general forgiveness of God, bestowed on those whose lives are serious and exemplary. I should endeavor to take up the subject not at all in a controversial form, but with something of the air and manner I should assume by the fireside with a serious-minded and thoughtful Unitarian who should wish me to tell him frankly what I thought was the real difference between the systems, and why I embraced the evangelical one. If I do not mistake, there are a great many inquirers and doubtful minds all over New England upon whom such a discussion might exert some influence." The twenty-two years of experience which had elapsed between the date of that letter and my association with my father aз my theological teacher in 1860 had, I think, led him to the conclusion that the difference between spiritually minded evangelicals and spiritually minded Unitarians was not so great as he had once thought. But his faith in a divine Helper and Healer of men, and his desire to write, not to demolish one theological system or to construct another, but to help inquiring and doubtful minds, never left him; and whatever of that faith and that purpose has inspired and directed my work was inherited from him.

My father was not a Calvinist certainly not in the sense in which John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards were Calvinists. But I imbibed from him a sympathy with two

phases of Calvinism-its reverence for divine sovereignty and its interpretation of human sinfulness. From him I learned to hold both the supremacy of law and the freedom of the will without attempting to harmonize them. "The only way in which the mind can be really at peace on this subject," he wrote in his "Commentary on the New Testament," "is humbly to acquiesce in our incapacity to fathom this gulf in theory, and then practically to yield a full and cordial assent, on the one hand, to the dictates of conscience which testify that we are entirely unrestrained in our moral conduct, and so accountable for it, and, on the other, to the word of God, asserting that Jehovah is supreme, and that his providence includes and controls all that takes place under his reign." On this subject, and on some others, my father was an agnostic before Huxley had coined the word; and I imbibed this measure of agnosticism from him.

Nor was he less explicit in recognizing a truth in the Calvinist's view of sin. Theodore Parker, in a letter written about 1859– 60, said: "I find sins, i. e., conscious violations of natural right, but no sin, i. e., no conscious and intentional preference of wrong (as such) to right (as such), no condition of enmity against God." I learned from my father that sins are the product of sin; that as virtue is something more than conscious performance of virtuous acts because they are virtuous, so sin is something more than conscious performance of wrong acts because they are wrong. In quoting from "The Corner-Stone" some extracts from his description of sinfulness as distinguished from specific sins, I am doing him an injustice, but were I to define his views in my own words the injustice might be even greater.

He did not believe with the Westminster divine that, as a result of Adam's fall, "we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil." In what seems to me an eloquent passage he describes the industry which characterizes the average American village, in which "each man labors thus industriously, day after day, and year after year, not mainly for himself, but for others;" the affection which unites the home, binding the mother "to her husband, her children, her home, and to all the domestic duties which devolve

John Weir's "Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker," Vol. I, p. 151.