Belford's Magazine, Volume II, No. 8, January, 1889

No doubt this gentleman told the truth. The sums subscribed, that counted in the millions, came from men not only of means, but of high social positions, who, not being altogether idiots, well knew the purpose for which their ample means were assessed. That able and honorable gentleman, Judge Gresham, whose well-known courage and integrity rendered him unavailable as a candidate for the Presidency at Chicago, points openly to these respectable corruptionists as the real wrong doers. It is more than probable that such may escape the penitentiary, and it is poor comfort to know that when such die lamented, their souls, in the great hereafter, will have to be searched for with a microscope.

The pretence offered for such assessments is too thin to cover the corrupt design. Says a prominent editor of the political criminals:

“The legitimate expenses of a national political canvass have come to be enormous. There is a great educational work to be done; a vast literature to be created and circulated; an army of speakers to be brought into the field; various organizations to be made and mobilized; machinery to be perfected for getting out the full vote; safeguards to be provided against fraud: all the immense enginery for persuading and marshalling at every fighting point the last score among six million voters.”

The comments upon this made by the New York Evening Post are so to the point, and conclusive, that we quote them in full. The Post says:

“Well, now, this being so, why did Wanamaker and Quay, when they had finished their noble work, burn their books and accounts? Missionary, tract, and Bible societies for mutual improvement and for aid to home study, lyceums and lecturing associations, not to speak of charitable and philanthropic associations, do not, after six months of unusual activity, commit all their papers, vouchers, and books of accounts to the flames. No such thing is ever thought of in Wanamaker’s Bethel Sunday-school. Why, then, was it done by the Advisory Committee? Religious and educational organizations, such as the Advisory Committee seems to have been, on the contrary, when they have raised a large sum of money and spent it in worthy ways are usually eager to preserve and spread the record of it, that others coming after them may be encouraged to do likewise. In fact, the more one reflects on the Wanamaker-Quay holocaust, the more mysterious it seems.”

This election of a chief magistrate, that shook the great republic from centre to circumference, was but a continuation of the corrupt system that began some years since, and is known to the public as that of “addition, division, and silence.”

This condition of the polls is no menace to our government. That period is gone. It is a loss of all. The ballot is the foundation corner-stone of the entire political fabric. Its passage to the hands of corrupt dealers is simply ruin. We may not realize this, but we do realize the contempt into which it has fallen. When the new President swings along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to be inaugurated, upon the side of his carriage should be printed what history with its cold, unbiased fingers will put to record:

“Bo’t for Two Millions of Dollars.”THE PULPIT CULT

In the days of our Saviour the rich man of Jerusalem would, on a Sabbath morning, bathe and anoint his body, and putting on fine linen and wearing-apparel, move in a dignified fashion to the synagogue, feeling that he was serving God by making God respectable in the eyes of men.

The proneness of poor human nature to lose in the mere form that for which the form was created to serve is the same throughout the world, and through all the ages, evolution to the contrary notwithstanding. As our physical being is, and has been, and will ever be about the same, our spiritual suffers little change. When Adam and Eve, leaving the garden of Eden, encountered the typhoid fever, that dread disease had the same symptoms, made the same progress to death or recovery, that puzzles the physicians to-day. That horrible but curious growth we call cancer was the same six thousand years ago that it is in this nineteenth century. The sicknesses of the soul are the same in all climes and in the presence of all creeds.

Said a witty ordained infidel who preached the salvation of unbelief many years at London, on visiting a business men’s prayer meeting: “Our merchants may not be Jews in their dealings, but they are certainly Hebrews in their prayers.”

The form has survived the substance. We have retained the customs and phraseology, while losing the meaning. As the rich men of Jerusalem who on the Sabbath thronged the Temple and were solemnly earnest in their prayers, returned to their cheating the day after, so we give unto God one-seventh part of our time and devote the rest to the practices of Satan. We are full of wrath and disgust at the Sunday-school cashier who appropriates the money of other people and, unable longer to conceal his thefts, flees to Canada. This is unjust. The poor man was not less pious than his president or his directors who neglected their duties and in many cases shared in the luxury. His crime was not in what he did, but in being caught at it before he could carry out his intent to replace the funds from his successful speculations. He saw in the leaders of his little congregation in the Lord, millionaires who had made all they possessed through fraud, and why should he, with the best intentions, not accumulate a modest competence through the same means? He heard nothing to the contrary from the pulpit. The eloquent divine told, in winning words, of the righteousness of right and the sinfulness of sin, but the illustrations were all, or nearly all, two thousand years old, and the words were the words of Isaiah and the prophets. To denounce the sins of to-day in “the vulgar tongue” would be to offend the millionaires of the congregation and lessen the salary of the worthy divine.

The late Chief Justice Chase once startled the writer of this by saying: “The wicked men are not in the penitentiary, they are in the churches. The criminals we convict are not wicked, they are simply weak – weak in character and weak in intellect. The men from whom society suffers are the cold, selfish, calculating creatures who not only keep clear of the courts but seek the churches, and deceive others as they deceive themselves and hope to deceive the Almighty.”

Sin is never so dangerous as when it gets to be respectable. The sanction of law, whether it gets to be such through custom or legal enactment, so nearly resembles the order of God that we accept it as such, and if it furthers our selfish greed we take it gladly.

The moral code, like that of municipal law, is made up of a few simple rules, easily understood, and the trouble comes in on the practice of the one and the application of the other. That church is divine which subordinates the rule to the practice, and has works as well as faith to testify to its commission. That is the true religion which leaves the sanctuary with the believer, and is with him at all hours, eats at his table, sleeps in his bed, and accompanies him to his labor. It never leaves him alone.

How we have separated the two, the precept from practice, this pulpit cult bears evidence. The high-toned infidel and lofty agnostic sneer at the humble Catholic who, in deepest contrition, confesses his sins to his spiritual adviser and goes forth relieved, probably to fall again. How much better it is to attend divine worship one day in seven, put on a grave countenance, and listen to eloquent discourses, more eloquent prayers, and heavenly music, and then go out with no thought of religion until the next Sunday returns for a like performance!

Two thirds of what comes under the head of moral conduct in one is pure selfishness. A man may be honest in his dealing, honorable in his conduct, a good citizen, a loving husband, and an affectionate father, and yet be without kindness, charity, faith, hope – in a word, all that brought Christ upon earth in His mission of peace.

One summer and autumn we lived at a mountain resort on the line of a great railroad. We saw, day after day, long lines of cattle-cars crowded with their living freight in a three-hundred-mile pull of intensest agony. The poor beasts were jammed against each other, unable to lie down, – to get under the hoofs of the others was death, – fighting, hungry, in the last stages of thirst, panting with tongues protruded, and their beautiful eyes staring with that expression of wild despair which the scent of blood brings to them, they rolled on to their far-off slaughter-houses with moans that were heart-breaking.

It was our fortune that same autumn to meet one of the cattle-merchants at church. He was there with his family. A stout, middle-aged man of eminent respectability, he was a church-member, and looked up to as a model citizen. We saw him listening to the eloquent sermon, and wondered if there were not a low, deep undertone of agony running through the discourse. When the prayers were offered up he knelt humbly, and covered his face with his hands. Did they shut out the wild, despairing eyes of those suffering beasts?

Yet how amazed would that estimable citizen have been had his minister said to him: “You are railroading your soul to hell. Every moan of those tortured animals goes up to God for record. You are freighting disease to great cities, and the fevers and death are yet to be answered for by you – wretched sinner!”

There is not a fashionable church in any city of our land that has not within gunshot of its door great masses of starving, sinful, poverty-stricken humanity. Crowded into tenement-houses, from the damp cellars to the hot garrets, they make one wonder, not that they die, but that they live. No eloquent discourse on the righteousness of right and the sinfulness of sin; no well-balanced sentences of prayers, sent up on perfumed air to our heavenly Father; no deep-toned thunder set to music in hymns, ever reach their ears, or could, if they did, carry consolation to the sorrowful, or curing to the sick. And yet, from marble pulpits to velvet-cushioned pews, the work goes on.

We beg pardon: it does not go on. The well-meaning divines complain of non-attendance. They are startled by the fact that not one-tenth of our population of sixty millions are really attending church-members. What can be done to popularize the pulpit? There is but one way, and that is to make the people desire to attend. Time was when the great truths of Christianity were new to the human race. The multitudes were eager to hear of the revelation, and the Church sent out its missionaries to preach and teach mankind. So far as a knowledge of these truths is concerned, the civilized people have been taught. There is not a criminal in jail to-day but knows more theology than St. Paul. The people are weary of this everlasting thrash of theological chaff. The civilized world is fairly saturated with preaching, which has come to be stale, flat, and in every sense unprofitable.

Instead of asking the people to come to the church, let the church go to the people. This is the secret of the sneers attending the Catholic faith. There is, with it, very little preaching, but a great deal of practice. Its orphan asylums, its homes for the aged poor, its hospitals, to say nothing of its great body of devoted priests and holy sisters of charity, tell why it is that its temples are thronged, and its conversions almost miraculous.

It is a grave error to suppose that true religion is to be advanced through the intellect. It makes its appeal to the heart. If it is not a refuge to the woful wayfarers of earth, it is nothing. If the sorrowful may not find comfort; they who are in pain, patience and hope; if the poor may not get sympathy and aid, and the dying consolation, it is of doubtful good.

As for the preaching, all that we can say is, that when one produces evidence and proceeds to argue, he admits a doubt that neither evidence nor argument is of avail. God’s truths call for no evidence. If they are not self-evident, no process of poor human reason can make them visible. An argument in behalf of such is a confession and a defeat. The man who undertakes to prove that the sun shines is insane and a bore.

The pulpit work of worthy divines who think aloud upon their legs has lost its attraction in losing its novelty. They imitate the late Henry Ward Beecher. And these immediate divines are filling their churches as merely platform-lecturers indulging in certain mental gymnastics that glitter and glisten like a winter’s sun on fields of ice. It is all brilliant and amusing to a few, but it is not religion.

A BEAUTIFUL LIFE

“Died at New York, 28th of November, 1888, Mrs. Eleanor Boyle Sherman.”

The above simple announcement of a sad event was read through more tears than usually fall to the lot of one whose unassuming, quiet life was passed in the privacy of a purely domestic existence. This not because she was the wife of a noted officer, nor the daughter of one of Ohio’s most famous statesmen, but for the excellence of her character and the Christian spirit of her retired career, that made her life one long, continuous deed of goodness. If ever an angel walked on earth administering to the sorrows and sickness of those about her, that angel was Mrs. Sherman. Inheriting much of her great father’s fine intellect, she added a heart full to overflowing with the sweetest sympathy for affliction in others. Self-sacrifice was to her a second nature. She not only carried in patient humility the cares imposed upon her by our Saviour, but cheerfully took up the woful burdens of those whose failing spirits left them fainting on their way. Her exalted social position was no bar to the poor, downtrodden, and oppressed. Her hand like her heart was ever open.

The heroism of private life is little noted among us. Acting out great deeds of self-sacrifice in the silent, unseen walks of domestic existence, it lacks the sustaining plaudits of a thoughtless public, and has no incentive to effort other than that found in the conscious presence of an approving God, and no hope of recompense beyond the promised approval of the hereafter when our heavenly Father shall say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

No man, however exalted his position may be, or distinguished his services, is ever followed to his tomb by more real mourners than one carriage can convey. The crape-canopied hearse, the nodding plumes of woe, the wailing music of the hired bands, the long procession of slow-moving coaches, the tramp of hundreds, tell only of human vanity: we make our show of sorrow. One vehicle only holds hearts breaking in an agony of grief – hearts that know nothing in their woe of the dear one’s greatness; know only that he has gone from their household that his presence had made so happy. In his death the dear walls of that home were shattered, the fire upon the hearth is dead, and the hard world darkened down to desolation’s nakedness. Could all who were favored in knowing this beautiful character, and blessed by her very presence, been called to form the funeral cortege, real heart-felt grief would have lived along the entire procession, and sobs, not strains of mournful music, would have broken on the ear. And in this procession would have been found not only the rich and well-born, clad in costly silks and furs, who had received from this gracious lady the divine influences of the Christian spirit, but the thinly clad poor, the dependent orphans, and helpless age. It is such a procession that does not disperse and disappear at the cemetery, but follows in prayer the mourned-for spirit to its home in heaven.

It is not for us to invade the sacred privacy of this lovely life. We owe an apology to her blessed memory for even this mention of her name. We know how she shrank from such while among us, and it is only as a duty to the living that we venture on this tribute to her excellence.

What we feel, and what must be felt by all, a pagan poet imbued unknowingly with the truest Christian impulses has sung in immortal verse:

“But thou art fled,Like some frail exhalation which the dawnRobes in its golden beams; – ah, thou hast fled!The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,The child of grace and genius! Heartless thingsAre done and said i’ the world, and many wormsAnd beasts and men live on, and mighty earth,From sea and mountain, city and wilderness,In vesper low or joyous orison,Lifts still its solemn voice: – but thou art fled —Thou canst no longer know or love the shapesOf this phantasmal scene, who have to theeBeen purest ministers, who are, alas!Now thou art not!* * * * *“Art and eloquence,And all the shows of the world, are frail and vainTo weep a loss that turns their lights to shade.It is a woe ‘too deep for tears’ when allIs reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,Whose light adorned the world around it, leavesThose who remain behind, not sobs nor groans,The passionate tumult of a clinging hope,But pale despair and cold tranquillity —Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things,Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.”

As a low, sweet echo to the music of those words, we add a tribute to the memory of this noble woman from the gifted pen of Helen Grace Smith:

Ah! Death hath passed us by – hath passed us near;The swift, keen arrow cutting the light air, And falling where she stood In perfect motherhood,With silver crown of years upon her hair.The many years – the glorious full years,All shining with her charity and truth — How tenderly we trace Their silent work of grace,Fulfilling the sweet promise of her youth!A life complete, yet lived not all in sun,But following sometimes through shadowed ways, Where sorrow and distress Cried loud that she might blessWith her pure light the darkness of their days.Resplendent mission, beautiful as hisWho fought for her in fighting for his land — Who heard the loud acclaim That gave his honored nameTo live wherever deeds of heroes stand.And she, the wife, the mother – ah! her tearsFell for the wounded sufferers and the dead — Fell for the poor bereaved, The helpless ones who grievedWhere ruin and despair lay thickly spread.Now peace – God’s peace – is brooding o’er the land,And peacefully she sleeps, her life-work done. We would not break that sleep, That rest so calm, so deep,That sweet reward by faithful service won.Only we kneel, as often she hath knelt,Where Heaven’s love lights up the quiet aisle, And, praying as she prayed, Our sorrow is allayed —Our grieving changed to gladness in God’s smile.

THE PASSING SHOW

The political season is over, and popular fancy lightly turns to thoughts of the drama. New York’s gay winter festivities are opening, and the theatres are nightly crowded with appreciative audiences. It would be strange indeed if, with upwards of twenty-five comfortable resorts for popular amusement in the metropolis, and a weekly change of attractions drawn from the best American and European sources, the most fastidious taste should fail to be pleased.

Probably the most successful of this year’s dramatic ventures is “The Yeomen of the Guard” at the Casino. The managers of that theatre have been wise to replace their variety-shows with this excellent comic opera. It steadily holds its own in spite of the critics, and after a three-months’ run continues as popular as ever. Mr. Aronson says it may remain at the Casino until the end of April. Gilbert and Sullivan’s productions are always new, always attractive. Each has a character of its own, yet no one could fail to detect the humor of Gilbert and the merry melodies of Sullivan in them all. If one may venture to compare their beauties, we should say that “Pinafore” excelled in vivacity – that peculiar sprightliness which the French call verve; “The Pirates” in humor; “Patience” and “Iolanthe” in satire – the one of a social craze, the other of political flunkeyism; and “The Yeomen of the Guard” in quaintness. The patter songs of the first are lacking in the last, hence its airs are not so dinned into one’s ears by the whistling youth of every street-corner, but the music is of a distinctly higher order. It is unfortunate that there is no change of scenery between the two acts. The dingy background of the Tower is not relieved by brilliance of costume, and the eye of the ordinary theatre-goer, accustomed to look for altered scenic effects, is disappointed at the repetition, only relieved by moonlight in the second act.

Some of the incidents of the play resemble “Don Cæsar de Bazan,” and are similarly worked out. Colonel Fairfax, imprisoned as a sorcerer, marries a young ballad-singer, who receives a hundred crowns, with the assurance that within an hour she will be a widow through her husband’s execution. He escapes, and is disguised as one of the Yeomen of the Guard, with whom, in spite of her vows, the young girl falls in love. A pardon for Fairfax arrives, his identity is established, the singer learns that the man she loves is already her husband, and all ends happily. In this transmutation of character, from the imprisoned sorcerer to one of the prison-keepers, we recognize the topsyturvydom of Gilbert, which is the distinguishing mark of his genius, from the Bab Ballads all through his later productions. In catchwords the present opera is lacking, and in the puns which never failed to draw out the “ohs” of the audience. But there is the same genial undercurrent of innocent humor which for years has amused the whole English-speaking public, and for which Mr. Gilbert deserves the lasting gratitude of a world too much given to life-sadness and mental worry. If “a merry heart doeth good like a medicine,” it is safe to say that the prescriptions of this most ingenious dramatic author have effected more widespread good than those of the most celebrated followers of Æsculapius.

It is especially to its music that the operetta owes its success. In this production Sullivan has excelled his former efforts. The first chorus is very fine, and in orchestration Sir Arthur shows himself to be without a rival. Its pure melodies form a valuable addition to English music, and mark the growth of a new school of which he is the leader. The influence of Wagner is clearly seen in some of its majestic marches, but the English composer escapes the metaphysical and unintelligible harmonies of the German school. Sir Arthur has evidently aimed at producing a more classical composition than any of his previous works, and he has done this perhaps at some slight sacrifice of immediate popularity. The jingle of “Pinafore” and “The Pirates” is replaced by a more sober style, which is likely to produce a lasting impression on English music.

Mary Anderson captured the town, as usual, on her return from England early in November. Palmer’s theatre was so crowded that it was difficult to get a seat even four weeks in advance, and the audiences were so enthusiastic that their enthusiasm constituted quite an interruption to the play. She chose “The Winter’s Tale” as her opening piece, taking the parts both of Hermione the queen and of her daughter Perdita. Miss Anderson is the first actress who has ever dared to so interpret the play. She tried it at the London Lyceum, to the horror of the critics, but it proved a great success. The resemblance between Hermione and her daughter, which Shakespeare insists on so strongly, gave Miss Anderson the idea of trying both parts. This plan had the additional advantage, that the leading lady is not suppressed by being cut out of the act in which Hermione does not appear. Her studies abroad have undoubtedly improved “Our Mary.” The coldness and statuesqueness with which she has been reproached could not now be discovered by the most adverse critic. She is more womanly, softer, less angular, and more graceful. The programme at Palmer’s should have been varied so as to give the public opportunity to see her in the old rôles that used to charm all beholders. One must not forget the exquisite scenery with which this piece has been set. It was used at the Lyceum, and, although it has been considerably cut down to fit the smaller stage of Palmer’s theatre, it is one of the best settings ever seen in this country.

Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett have been doing fairly with their Shakespearean revivals at the Fifth Avenue. There is no truth in the report that any difference has occurred between them. They will appear together at the Broadway Theatre next season, with better support, it is to be hoped, than they have recently had. Miss Mina Gale, who plays the leading female parts, however, is a promising young actress.