The City of Churches

Congregational

Mr. Beecher Says that no Man Has a Right to be His Own Enemy

Last evening Mr. Beecher preached his final sermon previous to starting upon an extended lectuing tour. he spoke from the text: "He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul, All they that have me love death." He said:

God addressed man in this curious way to warn him that all who sinned against themselves courted death. Right and wrong were simply terms to express the keeping or violation of laws. Those who committed sins against themselves hated life. They did not wish to exist, and so woent about doing away with themselves. At the same time laws which were broken ignorantly were not sins in the eyes of God. Man, on the other hand, did not forgive his fellow man a wrong simply because the transgressor was ignorant of the law. A court of justice always supported every man to have a knowledge ofthe laws. God often inflicted punishment upon mankind for the breaking of laws simply for the purpose of teaching us to know better next time. Man was only accountable to God for the which he did voluntarily. There were numerous kinds of laws to be kept and respected. Among them were the laws of society and business; the laws governing the social world, which were usually very severe and not to be lightly set aside; the laws of the church, of courts, and of institutions or corporations. Animals had hardly any laws governing their lives, but man a great many. The man of education and culture was surrounded by a perfect net work of laws, and was kept continually on the alert that he might no get into serious trouble. Of all laws those governing the body were the most sacred. Whatever injured the health was sinful, and a man had no right to be his own enemy. He should be held responsible to his fellow man for the keeping in order of the beautiful mechanism called the human body. The body was sacred and should be looked upon as sacred. Whatever weakened it was a sin. Man was bound to be at peace with the great laws of the world. Men who indulged to drink sinned not only against themselves but also against society. there were sins against organic society. No man should be allowed to violate the laws governing the possession of property. Property was sacred and all society should hold together in keeping it so. No man had the right to kill another. When a murder was committed all society cried out: "A life for a life.: The murderer was at once arrested and thrown into prison. If society had its was he would be immediately hanged, but the law stepped in to protect him. He was placed on trial and sentenced. The first revulsion of feeling in society wore out. The murderer began to receive sumpathy and bouquets, and went to the gallows with a rosebud in his buttonhole presented by some morbidly sympathetic woman. the speaker did not believe in capital punishment. He believed it was better to imprison a man for life. Savages always killed their prissoners, but in a civilized community, where so many jails and other institutions existed, a better us should be found for a man than putting him to death. There were the laws of peace and order, and a man violating this should be immediately suppressed. There were the laws of liberty. Every man had a right to himself and a right to everthing necessary in life. The very existence of a man implied all this .There were sins against the laws of morality and numerous laws to prevent their being committed against his own soul. Whatever tended to lower manhood and bring out the animal passions in a human being was a grievous sin. In the deep dungeons of a man's nature he sunk his conscience, placing bars and bolts upon the door. Man sunk his own soul in sin for the sake of pelt, money and what was called business. He gave up honor, twisted truth and used lies all for the sake of amassing a little fortune. Then in his old age, when he had gone through all the pollution and sin of a struggle for wealth, he attempted to retire from the battle and enjoy himself, but he found it impossible. All his insides were burned out. His health was broken down and he could find no pleasure in life. He was like a steamship which had to burn all its cargo to push its way through a stormy voyage. The man found in his old age that there was nothing left but the hulk. He had burned up the cargo keeping up the steam on this stormy voyage through life. This same man with all his bitter experience would teach his son to go and do likewise; teach him not to spend time over books and pictures and culture, but to devote his existence to the hoarding up of wealth. They said to their sons, "Make your fortune first and then you can enjoy your books and pictures," well knowing that they were telling an untruth. The getting of gold vulgarized the soul. A man might be called a good fellow and pass for one and still be all black and unclean wihtin. It was right for a man to care for himself, but not at the expense of others. There was a difference between selfness and seflishness. Selfishness wasa crime against society. Some men were good to their own households, but selfish to all the world outside of their homes. When men sacrificed others for themselves they sinned against their own souls. Men often put more weight upon outside laws then inside ones. they would not commit a conventional sin, such as reading a novel on Sunday, but they would "grasp a brother by the throat and cry, Give me that which thou owest." Men would not steal outright, but would at the same time cheat and swindle every one about them. Inside they were tarnished and foul with corruption, but before t he world they were orthodox in every particular. A man might live within the letter of the law and still be a criminal. Thousands of men were like that. The church sometimes contained more criminals than the prison. A judge might be more wicked than the prisoner at the oar before him. The sins hidden within the soul were the most dangerous.

In conclusion Mr. Beecher warned the young not to fall into the ways of selfishness, and to keep a guard upon themselves against committing the hidden sins as well as those which were more open. They should cultivate faith, imagination, hope and love. they should love equity. Above all they should see to it that God praised them, and being sure of this they could go on to the end in full confidence of their future.

Publication: Brooklyn Eagle; Date: March 16, 1886

Dr. Samuel Parkes Cadman on
The Spiritual Value of Culture

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Parkes Cadman, pastor of the Central Congregational Church, Hancock street, near Bedford avenue, delivered the commencement address at Oberlin College on Thursday last. By request he incorporated much of it into his sermon yesterday morning in his own church. His subject was "The Spiritual Value of Culture." The address follows:

"The danger of college life to-day is in mediocrity. There is less distinction now than formerly in being a graduate. Our homes and streets swarm with them. There is more likelihood of dwelling on the ocmmon level, since that level is higher than it was. But not the less does the constant ascendancy of life call for your elevation in individuality, in aim and in achievement. The charm of novely is past, the very abundance of our academic privileges is sometimes a barrier to stern and deeper discipline. We must not cease to conspire with each returning day, to insist upon a new bias and a fresh authority, for those eternal truths toward which the whole creation moves and of which you are the representatives and the advocates.

"When the prophey speaks of how great men and women benefit human life he shows that they serve the race by arresting the drift, even as the desert rocks dams back the choking waste of sand. On the most distant horizon of history, in dim legends, in folk-lore, in song and story, we discern the evidences of this audacity. Generally the bold ones paid the penalty their temerity excited. Like the ancient banner which meant victory to the cause, but death to the bearer, so they made their protest and sealed it with sacrifice. But the philosophy of the past and all its healing of hurt and proclamation of gospel reveals dependence upon great characters, whose discernment substituted true for conventional morality, whose effort removed the accretions of error whic hlesser men had cast upon the eternal difference God has set between right and wrong. The abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, the essential nobility of labor, the cleansing of social fountains, the removal of the relics of barbarism and the wrongs of civilization, the purification of speech and the triumphs of art and science and literature have been largely accelerated, when not actually caused, by free individuality moving under the compulsion of love and righteousness. Unto this end Oberlin stands appointed to emphasize the spiritual value of culture.

"Perhaps it will be better understood if we define our terms. Matthew Arnold was a man seriously impaired by prejudice and insular assurance, but his every word on the question of culture, is worthy of careful consideration. He rebuked John Bright for his fling at the friends and preachers of culture. He severely arraigned Frederck Harrison, the brilliant leader of the positivist school, for his statement that the very silliest rant of the day was the rant about culture. But if we remember the medieval tinge of some English schools the strictures of these men can be read in a new light. These schools suffered not coeducation, the resented science, they emphasized some useless studies. The unreal assumptions, the sickly cast, the absence of sympathy, the inertness and apathy against which John Bright protested, have damaged the influence of the den and the academic.

"But Dr. Arnold is stronger in his positive account of what culture really means that he is in his negative criticism. It is a desire to stagment the excellency of our own mixture to render an intelligent being more intelligent, having its origin, not in curiosity, as we use that term, but in a love of perfect life. Two sentiments are pervasive. First, the scientific passion for well ordered knowledge, and again the divine passion for doing good. To see, to learn the truth and make the truth the prevailing power of all life. This is culture, according to the apostle of sweetness and light. Simply to cherish these things for ourselves, to disassociate the one sentiment from the other, is a proceeding fraught with disaster. And this disaster. And this stands related vitally to all spiritual forces, because the conclusion they reach is an identified one. It is religion in its pregnant sense, and I am using the terms because they are different in meaning as much as for mental convenience.

"The final word of the Book of Books declares that the kingdom of God is within you. You are asked to make endless additions to self, in expansion of powers, in growth, in wisdom and beauty, and to reach this ever removing state the college has been instituted. But the expansion must be a general one. If you refuse to keep what you have by constantly bestowing it on those who have it not, you will not lose it. It is a twice blessed state, it blesseth him that gives and him than takes.

"Further, the gracious mingling of those elements in the due proportion saves from the excess against, which the Greeks masters warn us. Any neglect destroys the equipoise. The religious forces to-day need the grace, the geniality, the freedom of ths scholarly spirit, and scholarship needs the impulse of consecration, which devotion of God and man supplies. Sometimes these two elements have received names derived from the national exponents. They have been called hellenism and helbraism -- the tendencies toward perceiving, knowing, and also toward doing. But such distinctions should be carefully guarded; they are all absorbed in the sublime monotony of righteousness, which is the essential, the final, the supreme law of development for the individual, the nation, and the face. Wealth, arms, art, trade, government, must take their chance under that sovereign governance, and they should be cherished in the proportion of their service unto this end. Conscience is more than taste and moral blamelessness to be preferred before the cleverness of the senses; harmonized passions are the sweetest music and the purest delights are in the train of a profound and practical moral sense. When Mr. Arnold says that culture goes beyond religion, as religion is generally conceived by us, he indulges in specious talk which cannot fail to prove fatal to all good issues. The melancholy examples which show failure on a large scale because of the unwillingness or inability of nations to maintain the priority of God and His laws in their systems of knowledge were well known to this pleader. The world could not live by an incomplete message in the past. It needs the whole truth to-day. Holiness is wholeness, and wholesomeness, too, the standard, when rightly understood, of complete harmonious perfection.

"There is at present an aloofness from popular religion upon the part of earnest, thoughtful men. True this unfortunate condition is not without its brilliant exceptions, for which we feel profoundly grateful toward separateness upon the part of the learned and the wise. I sometimes wonder if we have not left the truth at some vital points quite as much as these people, and I opine that a mutual understanding would be beneficial to all concerned. But a truce to the painful query. Is it an outgrowth of this discussion to be mentioned in passing?

"The spiritual value of culture in mental discipline is an offset to the material and superficial estimates of this wealthy age. The possession of the atmosphere by the mind, the filling of it with principles and song and music, these were a more enduring possession for Germany than her conquests of a later day. England's coal fields may become exhausted but her glory in Shakespeare and Milton, Tennyson and Browning, cannot fade. Our true greatness is not in braggart shouts concerning power and resources, but in the strength and dignity and inspiration of our social countenance set against any wrong. The inestimable service you render others by patient self mastery and painful toil is felt wherever you move as a corrective for that fatal superficiality of temper which breeds cheap men, cheap thinking, cheap phrases, cheap hymns, cheap everything, and reinforces the burden of shoddy product beneath which we groan. The indirect influence of such sacrificial labor upon the world is an unexplored realm. And you can have no evangel for others which has not cost you weary toll. A few choice, close thinkers formed a band which liberated Europe. They were the noiseless forces overwhelming ancient traditions, and no man can write the history of modern days without continually recognizing their efforts. But they could not have done this were they not first the masters of themselves.

"So, let us cheerfully accept the drudgery of thinking, the unfamiliar as against the common, the hard work and unremitting sweat of brain which brings your thought and aim to heel at call. In such efforts, renewed daily, the fog lifts, the illusions scatter, you see men as trees walking and the first meaning of 'ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free' dawn across the soul. When the real temper of mind and heart necessary to knowledge and growth and service has been acquired, you perceive in the studies you follow the hidden secrets they will reveal only to the initiated.

"Take art, which is praise, dealing with beauty only, as science and literature deals with facts, and what to know, so art teaching us what to feel and enjoy rightly. In its constructive side the artist finds joy in the power given him to manifest God's glory; on the interpretive side He brings to others an intelligent appreciation and even rapture in the works of the Supreme.

"The world's no blot nor blank when thus laid hold of by cultured processes. Its meanings are our meat and drink. No glory passes away from the earth when we view it with clarified vision. The light of common day is the same radiance undimmed in splendor which first glided the solitary peak with the torch of dawn. And when we recognize that no bush, nor flower, nor river, nor the ground on which we tread, but is a divine thought, throbbing with the presence of God, then that sense of sacred unity will throw on the canvas its own beauty and give new meaning to the chisel which reveals the heart of marble.

"Bishop Westcott shows us that Christian art, through the fact of the incarnation, has given a wholly new significance to all nature and to all life. It has brought a sacramental element into all that touches our senses and its special aim is to realize beauty in life in the light of faith, to find in humanity and nature, despite ravages, the clew to the events which is creation's crown, that the word became flesh. Manhood is not, for the Christian artist, as it was for the Greek, the final type of the highest, but a sign and a pledge of the spiritual destiny of the finite. Here all rudimentary powers require seriousness and cultivation; here, as it seems to me, is the hope of this great pursuit, its redemption from folly, its cleansing from stain; here is the spiritual crown of mechanical methods and cultured means, and here, as everywhere, the unity I am trying to enforce most signally prevails.

"The fascination for the scenes and haunts of the older portions of the world is not because their native beauties are superior to those more recently known. The Alps are not above the Andes and the Rockies in this respect. Rather it is because in these great books of God we have no longer conned and the light of this interpretation is more concentrated upon the Rhine then upon the Hudson. And when our sceneries are spiritualized, and indeed, they are in part, as by Whittier in New England, they will be afresh invested with new delights and praises. Surely the words of Pericles should be ours too, possessing the country we do. "We are devoted to beauty, while we guard frugality; we are devoted to wisdom without the loss of manliness.' And when the soul has reached these treasures thus placed before it, the man and the woman will find no rest until their life corresponds with their patrimony.

"The spiritual value of literature; what a theme, with unsuspected heights and depths. I mention it since for mention it clamors, but any reference must be bare and fragmentary. So rich and suggestive are the various enticements of this topic, one is tempted to linger. Yet finals ends can only be attained by final means, and compromise here is frequent and sometimes it sullies the record. Popular education has been set back by tawdry books. Knowledge has been laid waste for by a spread of ephemeral and harmful literature. We may not share the taste of an old Highland deerstalker, but we can admire it. He lived fifteen miles from human intercourse and the good Bishop of Stepney asked if he might send him some magazines with which to employ the long winter evenings. 'No,' he replied, 'I have not wish for light stuff such as that, but could you get me a copy of the Sermons of Jonathan Edwards?' And then he added, 'He gives such a grand account of the scheme of redemption!' Such words echo in the heart of a true student. They should warn us that there is a sinister side to the shield, when we expatiate on the infinite blessings of literature. Think of the misuse of books, the debilitating waste of brain, in aimless, promiscuous reading or even in the poisonous inhalation of mere garbage. No book can be more than the man who wrote it; it may be less, and many are not desirable companions. Art we not in danger of seeking stimulus rather than solidity, of stuffing our minds with the trivial or the merely curious, of neglecting the nutritive elements of reading and the spiritually sustaining; of reading about Milton and Goethe rather than reading them, of dallying with the books of the day rather than pondering over the books of the ages, the precious heirlooms of our race?

"An impotent veracity for desultory information must be subdued, the abiding must be sifted from the evanescent parts of knowledge. Then comes discrimination, choice, system, comprehension, fitness and the highest contact, the finding of the very eye of God, so to speak, for every girl and woman before me. Our stately Milton said, 'As good almost kill a man as kill a good book.' In the great republic of letters the spirit of freedom and equality prevails: here is seen the inmost min of man, apart from shrouding mantle and disguise, no introduction is needed. We hear Johnson moralize and Burke perorate and Wordsworth muse on the dewy hillside and Scott tell his necromancers without asking leave or paying toll. And out of this wondrous realm there come trooping all the gracious and blessed forces which have spun electric thoughts from mind to mind, dissolved barriers, plucked down the mighty and exalted the humble and the weak. And since no volume can endure which does not respect the sanctions of divine law and reverence truth in its innermost parts, one may easily see the spiritual value of a knowledge of literature pursued in right lines.

"Theology finds vent in fiction, in the doctrines of the conscience as you have it in 'Romola' and 'The Scarlet Letter.' George MacDonald and Mrs. Humphry Ward expound their religious systems or lack thereof, in the form of a tale. The best and purest Christian optimism flows out of Browning's deep springs of though. Tennyson's services to the faith in his 'In Memoriam' can be dimly seen now he is gone, when you read his biography. He saved Oxford from agnosticism by this single poem, as surely as Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe doomed slavery by a second rate novel and James Russell Lowell smooth the nation's conscience with his glorious verse. Why should I linger to demonstrate further the value of culture as a spiritual force, or the spiritual value of the forces of culture, take it as you will? I can but hint at the revolution in the attitude of scientific thought in the past ten years. Had I stood here a decade ago these hints would have been denied by the trend of opinion among cultured scientists. They are not denied to-day. She has discovered her sheer inability to cast out God from her thinking, and the utterances of Professor Romanes, the later words of even Mr. Huxley, and the last word of Mr. Spencer would indicate that the tidal wave of materialistic agnosticism which threatened to become a mania is lowering its crest.

"We advocate that each life grow on its own root, and that root should be deeply fastened in God. We believe self-knowledge leads to self-reverence, self-control, and these conduct life to sovereign power. And above all we hold true to the Christian interpretation of life, to seek to know, to learn, to love, to serve, to die, as John Richard Green said, learning to die as Jesus did, loving, these are our ultimates. The busy world swallows up our graduates year by year, but the soul instilled here finds its familiar outside and works and waits in mingling of labor and of faith for the new day.

"When John Richard Green spent an evening with Gladstone he says of him: 'I felt proud of my leader, because he was so noble of soul.' Let us so live and act here that we may keep the soul of this nation alive and masterly. This is the supreme care for which God invested you with life and sex and peculiar facilities. Others are seeking lower ends; some in anarchy would destroy all. But we go out from these cloistered retreats to maintain the spirit of a mighty people, to give it force, direction, courage, purity and Godward aim. And this can be a common pursuit until the manhood and womanhood of America, free without license, and fearless without pride, and tender without maudlin weakness, becomes the revelation and crown of culture in spiritual realms.

Dr. Cadman will not be in his pulpit again until the second Sunday in September. He and his family sail on Friday for England. During July and August the Central and Tompkins Avenue Congregational will hold union services.

Publication: Brooklyn Eagle; Date: January 30, 1902